All in How You Say It: A Laramie Christmas Story
by Sevenstars
Summary: Jess's first Christmas at Sherman Ranch brings him more than just Christmas presents.


**All in How You Say It**

_**A Laramie Christmas Story**_

_by Sevenstars_

SUMMARY: My version of Jess Harper's first Christmas at Sherman Ranch.

We know, from "The Sound of Bells," that the second holiday our Texan spent in Wyoming was marked by a very real threat of annihilation by Indian attack, but even then, and with Andy and Jonesy in St. Louis, he and Slim still put up a tree and exchanged presents. So what was it like when, for perhaps the first time in a decade, Jess found himself being drawn into a family celebration of what Chip Davis of Mannheim Steamroller calls "the highlight of the year"? It was a story I had to tell! Thanks to Lisa for an extra-quick beta.

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It had all begun, really, long before the first snow fell; before Jess killed the Hamry kid in the yard and took off, before even the fall roundup. It was the very beginning of September; the mountaintop had acquired a cap of white, the watering trough was beginning to show a thin crust of ice some mornings, and the leaves were barely starting to turn; but even this early, it was getting too chilly for the two of them to sit out on the porch much any more, once it got dark, so they'd begun to get in the way of staying up for a bit after Andy and Jonesy turned in, and Slim, with the help of a rough map sketched out on a piece of old sheeting (that being the biggest item he could find for the purpose), was showing Jess how the local ranchers did the fall gather, and how he took part in it. "Most of our land is fenced, at least this winter graze, you know that already," he said, "but you also know that the cattle have been up in the higher country all summer, and there's no fence there. They don't stray much in the warmer weather, when they can find all the grass they want without havin' to work too hard for it, but since most of our neighbors use the high graze too, the stock's likely to mingle, and I usually like to be my own roundup rep; it gives me a kind of foot in the door when they start talkin' about who'll go to Cheyenne with the combined herd."

Jess nodded. "Does that mostly include you?"

"Mostly, yeah," Slim agreed. "Which means somebody will have to be in charge here, inside our fence lines and later while I'm gone, what with the stages, and since you've been here since spring, I'd like it to be you. You're used to our routines now, and just in case somethin' like a freak early snow should come up, you know this spread as well as I do; better than anybody I might hire for a week or two. With six or seven hundred head of our cattle to gather up, on open range, I was figurin' three more hands should be enough; that way everybody can work in teams, and when we get a herd together two of us can hold it and two keep the fire."

"Sounds good to me," said Jess, warmed by this show of the rancher's trust. He was cattleman enough himself to understand what it meant that Slim was willing to leave his land, his stock, his relay franchise—his _livelihood_—in the hands of a man he'd known barely four months, not to speak of the safety of his brother and his oldest friend. "When was you thinkin' of doin' the hirin'? Don't want to wait too long or everybody that's lookin' to pick up a few extra dollars for the winter'll have a job already."

"I thought this weekend, when we go into town for supplies," Slim told him. "Which reminds me—we've got to think about gettin' you some winter gear, Jess. You can't make it through the next few months with just that brush jacket of yours."

Jess hesitated; he didn't want to sound like a whiner—men who complained weren't well thought of in cattle country—but the truth was that even with the stage-line contract, things were often tight financially around Sherman Ranch, and while he was theoretically supposed to be paid thirty a month, plus his bed and board and feed for his horse, there'd been a couple of times when Slim had had to ask, apologetically, if he'd mind having it shined on for a while. Most recently when the quarterly mortgage payment came due. From what Slim and Jonesy had told him, Jess knew that Slim's pa had nailed the land down securely: he'd been a freighter on the Santa Fe Trail and elsewhere, an Indian trader, a mustanger, and a small-scale stock breeder even before he settled in Wyoming, so he'd made better money than many men did, and had been able to put some by even with a wife and son to provide for. He'd had a farm off which the family took most of its food, and which he'd sold for a tidy sum when they came west, making back a good six times what the land had originally cost him; and he'd also served in a militia outfit in the war with Mexico, been a sergeant, and gotten land scrip for it, enough to file on 2730 acres. He'd resisted the temptation to sell that scrip to speculators, as so many men had done, and instead had hung onto it till he could use it to locate the ranch, laying out his claim shrewdly, making sure to get control of the water and the best land, which also gave him, under customary range law, control of as much as ten times that of the lesser ground. He'd whipsawed his own lumber for the barn and the sheds and part of the house, cut logs for the rest. His cattle, in the beginning, before his herd began to build, had mostly been bought cheap from westbound wagon trains—cattle too lame, sweenied, footsore or overdriven to go on, but capable of being brought back if they were allowed to rest and stuff themselves on decent graze—or gathered up off the range after a stampede, wagoners' cattle often being unable to stand the spectacular thunderstorms that blew up in this country, and likely to explode in all directions when a big one got going. But there had been the expenses of putting up fence, paying hands (even if only for part of the year), buying more and better breeding stock, erecting and furnishing the buildings—hardware and such, some furniture, horse gear and barn equipment, the buckboard; hay and feed, food for the family, later taxes on the land and the stock, fencewire, machinery, all in addition to making sure of more of the land, though that hadn't been far from free, because under the Graduation Act, country classed as grazing only went for twelve and a half to fifty cents an acre. The loan hadn't started out big, but when sometimes all you could pay on it was the interest, it mounted up. Only since he got the contract to start running the station had Slim been able to really chip away at it, and he was anxious to get it paid off; he was thinking he'd like to send Andy East to school in the next year or two, and that would mean more money out of pocket, maybe a hundred dollars a year not counting fares and living quarters.

Jess was no stranger to the northern ranges: he'd ridden dispatch out of Fort Lincoln, travelled the Lolo Trail, worked at the Diamond D spread north of Casper. But this was the first time he'd been expected to spend a winter north of the Platte. He tended to migrate, like a lot of drifters, according to the season—north, away from the oven along the Border, in the spring; south again in the fall. Always before, when the days began to get noticeably shorter and a nip came into the air, he'd start thinking of warmer climes—Texas, New Mexico, Arizona. One year he'd even set out for California; he'd heard it was always summer there, and he had some vague notion of seeing the Pacific Ocean. Like a smooth blue prairie, he thought it must be, stretching on and on as far as your eyes could see. And he'd heard, too, that California was a place where a person could start all over again; that this, along with the climate and the rich soil, was one of the reasons people went there. But in the end he'd only gotten as far as Carson City before an early blizzard shut the Sierra Nevada passes down; in fact, if it hadn't been for the woman named Annie Whitaker whose cabin he'd stumbled across, he'd have died in that blizzard. He knew that by the time he crossed back to the Rockies they'd be snowed up too, and at least around Carson the winter temperatures averaged above freezing, so he'd spent that winter around the Comstock Lode country; there was always work in those parts for a man who knew how to handle a gun, Fargo and the mines needed guards (Jess himself had spent the season riding shotgun), lawmen needed deputies (though Jess had never gone that route), and if you were really lucky you could score a job as a lookout in some nice warm saloon.

He thought about that, and about the stories he'd heard about Wyoming winters. Should he stay? He knew Slim needed the help; Jonesy had quietly told him that with a second man to back him up, someone he felt he could depend on, the rancher wasn't wearing himself down the way he used to, was eating better, sleeping sounder, not even worrying so much over the books; said he smiled more, laughed easier, was all around better company than any time since his ma had died. What was more, Jess felt comfortable here as he never had in any other place he'd worked, not even when he and Will Tibbs had tried to make a go of a homestead in Colorado a couple of years back—he'd liked Will and trusted him, never would have gone partners with him otherwise, but with Slim, with Andy and Jonesy, there was something... something more. Something he didn't have the education to describe to himself, except to think that, maybe, it was what he'd heard in the voices of some of the men he'd served in the war with, when they talked about their families and their homes and how they dreamed of living long enough to see them again...

And for all that he'd managed to put some money away. Despite the tricks he'd showed Andy that first day, Jess didn't usually play dishonest poker; he only cheated when he knew somebody else had set the ball rolling. __If it's an honest game, play it that way, but if it's crooked, take their shirts, pants, and socks before you're through,__ was his credo. Being a good gambler required certain traits of character—call them gifts—that were equally useful to a good gun-for-hire: skill, courage, strategy, psychology, and patience. That was why so many of the big-name gunfighters were also gamblers on the side. So Jess, using just the things that made him good at his primary trade, was able to match most of the casual, just-to-pass-an-evening card players he was likely to meet in Laramie. Most months, if he'd gotten paid on time, he could take $25 of it and run it up by three-quarters or so, even at nickel-ante, bringing his total income to almost $50, and with his bed and board supplied and little else to spend his money on, he'd saved a good half of it—close to $100 over these last four months, besides the $165 he'd kept out of the reward for Bud Carlin. It was more money than he'd had in... he couldn't rightly recall how long. "How much gear d'you reckon I'll need?" he asked. "You're the one knows this country."

Slim gave the question the consideration it was due. "A good stout sheep-lined coat first of all," he said, "a long one that comes down over your hips. I saw one in the store last time I was there; forty-two dollars and eighty cents, it was, though you might be able to bargain that down, at least to maybe forty. A pair of fleece-lined arctics or snow excluders that you can buckle over your boots, figure as much as four dollars if you get the high-top kind. At least a couple more sets of wool underwear and a couple of good wool shirts, shield-front would be best; a wool sweater and a few pair of wool socks—you'll want to wear two at a time the coldest days. A wool muffler—maybe two—and a pair of leather mittens, and wool gloves for underneath 'em. Heavy pants and latigo-leather chaps. It's not that we go out that often in the cold weather, but we do have to check on the stock at least once a week, as long as the snow's not too deep to ride in, and if it looks like they're eatin' down the grass or makin' a wreck out of the haystacks where they are faster than I figured they would, we have to move 'em before the next big snow." He got up and crossed to the desk, rolled its top back as he sat down, pulled a tablet of paper to him and began scribbling figures. "Let's see... better count on the highest prices, though you might be able to get a bargain... three-fifty or four for the sweater, seventy cents a pair for the socks, a couple dollars each for the undershirts and drawers, maybe a dollar sixty for the mittens, dollar and a quarter for the gloves, six dollars for the pants, shirts five apiece... chaps'll run maybe as much as seventeen..." He looked up quizzically. "I'd say you're lookin' at up around a hundred, hundred and ten dollars for the whole outfit, Jess."

"Dad-gum," Jess muttered, "that's a heap of money. Ain't got even three hundred last I counted." Then he realized how that sounded. " 'Course if I stay on through the winter I'll make it back again. That's if you had in mind to keep me after roundup."

"I wouldn't be talkin' about cold-weather gear if I didn't, would I?" Slim asked, and sighed. "If it only wasn't that the season looks like comin' on early this year—Jonesy says his sacroiliac is givin' him all kinds of talk... if it looked like an easy winter, or a late one, maybe you could hold on through Christmas, and Santa Claus'd bring you some of what you'll need..."

"Ain't askin' for no charity," said Jess shortly, and Slim looked up with a blank, startled expression. Jess remembered then that he'd never really told the other man what his boyhood had been like.

"Christmas presents aren't charity," said Slim, obviously trying hard not to sound hurt. "We all give 'em back and forth, me and Jonesy and Andy. 'Course Andy can't afford much, but he's got his pocket money, two bits a week I give him—even a kid deserves to have some money of his own, and he saves from that, and runs a trap line and sells rabbits to the meat market in town, and trades the skins in at Benson's. And the stage passengers give him tips, too." The custom of tipping boys was widespread throughout the country, even if they had done nothing particular to deserve it: any conscientious visitor to a home could be counted on for at least a quarter for each son of the house, and the most liberal would go as high as a dollar. "When Ma and Pa were alive..." He let the words fade into a sigh. Then: "Well, I still owe you some back pay; I'll cover the coat to make up for it, I can put it on my tab at the store."

Jess took a breath to protest, then stopped himself as he thought it over. He hadn't really been keeping track—he'd always had kind of an easy-come, easy-go attitude toward money, having grown up with very little of it—but he knew Slim did; after all, money—what it took to run the place, what he owed at the bank and the store, what was supposed to be coming from the stage line—was one of the biggest concerns of his life, and if he said he owed some, it was likely to be true. "A'right," he agreed, a bit gruffly, "that's fair. That leaves it sixty or seventy that I'll have to pay out myself. When you reckon we better do this?"

"Soon as we can," said Slim. "I like to have everything laid in by the first of October, though we don't often get snow this low that early; gives us a little time to make sure the place is all winter-ready and the stock's in the best places. We'll all go in together, Andy needs some more stuff too—all legs, that boy is. And we'd better do it this week, before the stores start gettin' sold out, or the stage line decides to call us relay operators in for another meeting."

Came Saturday, and they all headed into town. After Jonesy's order had been filled, and while the clerk was loading it into the buckboard, Slim called the storekeeper aside. "Jess needs a good stout winter jacket, Jock. That one in the window, would you have one in his size?"

Benson gave Jess's sturdy form a scan with the practiced eye of one who has done the same hundreds of times. "I believe I do. Of course he'll want to allow some room for layers underneath—"

"Yeah," said Jess wryly, "so Slim's been tellin' me."

"I owe him thirty dollars back wages," Slim went on. "Would you take that much for it?"—beginning at the lowest price he was willing to pay, to give room for bargaining.

"Now, Slim, I got expenses—"

"And Jess has an outfit to get, and he's willing to buy all of it here—or do you want us to get on the stage and go to Cheyenne?" Shrewdly: "We'll be goin' up after elk sometime this coming week; they should be on the move since that snow fell. What if I throw in a half carcass?" He knew Jock loved game, and with his store to take care of had little opportunity to go after it himself. Fresh antelope and deer sold for four or five cents a pound, and elk, being both bigger and harder to get, went for more, as much as seven and a half, so a half-carcass would run better than nine dollars, depending on weight; that would bring it up almost to forty he'd be giving for the jacket, one way or the other.

"Well..."

"Come on, Jock, if you and Marcie don't eat it all up yourselves you can sell some to Schroder—" that was the butcher. "That ought to go some way toward coverin' your expenses. Or just hang it in your woodshed and it should keep till spring."

Benson gave it just long enough, then nodded. "Done."

Slim asked for a paper and pen, and quickly wrote out an I.O.U.: _One half elk carcass, to weigh not less than 125 pounds dressed, at any time before the fall drive; _signed it with a flourish and dated it. They assembled the rest of Jess's outfit and paid for it, and Jock wrapped it up and they tucked it securely under the buckboard seat before going over to the Stockmen's Palace to see if there was anyone hanging around looking for work.

The roundup proceeded as it usually did, with Slim repping for himself in the community gather and Jess running things inside S R fences; the final tally showed 249 cows of all ages, 195 calves aged six months and under, 120 yearlings of both genders, fifty two-year-old steers, and forty-three three's wearing the Sherman brand, and a total of thirty-four four-year-olds and thirty-seven old cows were sent to market. That wasn't quite $2060 for the year, even without factoring in the monthly stage-line payment, which for a still-small operation like Slim's wasn't bad at all—a bit under $40 a week, when many families supported themselves on no more than that every month. There'd be taxes on the land and the stock, but the former especially were negligible since most of what Slim owned was unimproved grazing; less than $100 altogether, and not due till after the New Year anyway. The Overland called its station operators to Denver for one of the regular meetings, and the ranch family began buttoning up as the end of the year approached.

Winter in range country, especially on the northern ranges, was a time to hole up. Freight caravans stopped deliveries, and often even the stagecoaches didn't run for days at a time. People in the outlying districts cut back on their trips into town, since even wagons on sleigh runners could have trouble bucking drifts; storekeepers warehoused stock throughout the summer and early fall for the town-dwellers, who could usually make it around if they had to. Outdoor work slowed to a crawl; ranchers let go as many as seven out of ten of their hired help. For the homesteaders, it was often a season that brought in more cash money than their farming did, as most of them had one or more winter occupations—market hunting, a trap line, cutting ice or timber or firewood (or sometimes a combination), gunsmithing, clock repair or some similar kind of tinkering, or, like their Eastern counterparts, making tools and harness and using the elemental and inexpensive pocketknife to turn out objects for sale: toys, butter paddles, piggins and noggins, spoons and bowls, duck decoys, piecrust edgers, combs, bread-trays, runlets, keelers, firkins, buckets, churns, dye tubs, powdering tubs, cowles, hat-racks, clothes-trees, picture frames, gambrells for butchering, sled runners, hames for horse collars, hay hooks, bean poles and sifters, feed boxes, goose and hog yokes, thills and shafts for carts, cheese ladders, traps, flails, hoops, shingles, ax handles, mauls, single- and doubletrees, door and gate latches.

Every year, around September or October, during the fall roundup or right after it, Slim began moving his stock closer to the most sheltered parts of his range—the parts where, a month or two before, he'd already put up haystacks to supplement the natural feed. He stockpiled the supplies the household would need to carry itself through the next few months, buying more of grain, staple groceries, kerosene, and other basic necessaries than he did on weekly trips in the good weather, making sure Andy's winter clothes still fit him (which they usually didn't), replacing them as necessary. He rode his fences, tightening them up against the stresses of the cold weather to come, when heavy snows or falling trees could bring down whole sections of wire—or break a rail turned brittle by sub-zero temperatures, though there wasn't much he could do to prevent that. He culled out any cattle that didn't look able to make it through the winter, so he could save the range and the hay for the ones best able to benefit from them; these could be sold locally, to the butcher or the hotel in town, and so didn't require long driving. He assembled tools and harness that could be repaired over the long winter evenings, made sure his buildings were tight and their foundations thickly banked with sod, got the sleigh runners for the buckboard and the big wagon out of storage in the hayloft, cut dead trees and hauled them in to headquarters to be sawn up as needed for firewood. Before the first snow fell he strung stout ropes from the house doors across the side yard to the woodshed and chickenhouse, and from there to the barn and around the corral to the icehouse, so that even if a blizzard shut down they could still find their way around, at least sufficiently that they could do the chores. And he began shifting his mental focus from cattleman to teacher.

His mother had taken a big part in his own schooling, though he'd at least had a school to go to, in Illinois, before he started going up the trail with Pa when he was thirteen; it had only kept about sixteen weeks out of the year, being in farming country, and he'd probably actually _learned_ more at home, but a school it had been. But it had been Andy whose teaching she'd had the biggest hand in: there'd been no school in Laramie when they first settled here—still wasn't, though now it was beginning to look like one might be established soon. She had read to both of them from the time they could understand words, and as reading aloud often involved books written for a grown-up audience, their interest in the printed page, from which she elicited such fascinating stories and marvelous facts, came early. And Andy, so much younger than the brother who for most of his life was his hero, was so eager to copy him and learn his skills that he demanded to be taught to read and cipher when he was only four. With the McGuffey _Readers_ and an ecletic assortment of conventional books, plus practical pencil-and-paper arithmetic such as any range family needed, Mary Sherman was able to ground him securely in basic knowledge and processes. Pa had always said, "If a body's got a normal curiosity, all you got to do is teach him to read and make change; he'll claw the rest out for himself." (To which Ma had added, "You'd do well to teach him to write, too.") Slim had certainly found that to be true with regard to himself, and Andy was the same way. Like all rural kids, he had to fall back on his own resources for much of his amusement—books and magazines, his pets, fishing and swimming and exploring when the weather would let him, an assortment of simple toys like tops, diavolo, and whittled or boughten figures, games like checkers and dominoes. Reading was one of the easiest of these: it required no one else (as most games did), it could be done at any hour, indoors or out, fair weather or foul, and if you enjoyed the book you could read it again, over and over, which made it cost-effective even for a family that wasn't always sure where the money for the next mortgage payment or wagonload of grain was coming from. Clothbound books cost sixty cents or more, depending on the ornateness of the binding and the number of illustrations, but many "good" books were reprinted in paper covers for no more than thirty and sometimes as little as a dime, though in fact it was actually worth it to buy the slightly more expensive editions, since they were more durable; if you decided they weren't your speed, book-swapping was a widespread custom throughout the West.

For most range kids, formal schooling wasn't a practical option. Like farm children, anyone over the age of six or eight was needed at home during the high season, from March or April till first snow, if not to actually help with the ranch work, at least to substitute on chores for the ones who did. And setting aside menaces like Indians, winter, the only time they were free to attend classes, was an iffy proposition, especially on the northern ranges: a blizzard could blow up with only a few hours' warning—and winter in Wyoming (if you counted winter as that period during which snow could accumulate) could begin any time from early October and last till mid-May, with the window for freezing temperatures beginning around mid-September and running into early June. Distances played a big part in the situation too. Town kids could make it home through the snow, especially if the teacher dismissed them as soon as the flakes began to get thick, but a ranch youngster, even with a savvy pony under him, might not be able to, and the farther he had to go, the riskier it got—especially on the stage road, which did a fair amount of curving and bending to find the easiest grades, and for one stretch ran alongside a deep, steep-sided ravine which in bad weather could be dangerously invisible. Even grown men with ten or twenty years' experience could get lost in a good snowstorm; Slim wasn't about to risk his twelve-year-old brother—well, almost thirteen now—being able to do what they couldn't. Among the bigger cattlemen, some families maintained two homes, or Mother and the youngsters moved into town for several years so the latter could go to school, but for those in Slim's income range that wasn't economically feasible.

Fortunately, like most Westerners who could read at all, Slim liked the very best books, the kind you could read and enjoy over and over; and his mother, who had much the better education of his parents, had spent nine years, before her marriage, as the principal of a young ladies' school, earning over $500 a year and saving a good quarter of it, so she'd been able to assemble a respectable home library out of her own money. Born in 1843, the first volumes that had impressed him vividly were the fairy tales and the ballads about dashing characters like Robert Bruce, William Wallace, and Rob Roy, but he had also discovered at an early age a huge old illustrated Bible from which, on Sundays, he read "the fightingest parts," and stories like that of the Witch of Endor. The year of his birth had also seen the publication of Shakespeare in the Kenny Meadows edition, with illustrations of fairies, which drew him naturally to _A Midsummer Night's Dream, _and from there to the conversations between Falstaff and Ford in the _Merry Wives, The Tempest _with Ferdinand and Miranda at chess, Cleopatra cuffing the messenger, the asp in the basket of figs, the Friar and the Apothecary, Troilus on the Ilian walls and Cassandra in white muslin with her hair down. Then there was the three-volume Lane translation of_The_ _Arabian Nights, _with the Harvey illustrations—264 tales of characters with tongue-twisting names like Sinbad and Codadad, Prince Agib, Gulnare and Pereizade, Camaralzaman, Schemselnihar, Scheherazade the peerless, Bedreddin Hassan, and Badroulbadour (though not of Aladdin or Ali Baba, who didn't appear in that edition), and of rocs, gazelles, dervishes, afrits, sandalwood, ivory, turbans, ambergris, cream-tarts, lettered apes, one- eyed Calendars, ghouls, the Flying Horse, and genies taller than a church steeple. Lane was a scholar of the Middle East (they also had his _Manners and Customs of the Modern_ _Egyptians, _which predated the _Nights_ by three years, though Slim didn't read it till he was grown), and the books were a vast storehouse of information on the manners and customs, the spirit and life, of the East, yet beyond the knowledge of history and geography came something finer, subtler, and more vital. And a "Sunday novel" called _Naomi, or The Last Days of Jerusalem,_ published in 1840, from which Slim took away an unforgettable impression of battering-rams and of a man on the battlements who cried, "Woe, woe to myself and to Jerusalem!" He loved the martial poems like "The Eve of St. John" ("The Baron of Smaylhome rose with the day"), and _The Lady of_ _the Lake_ and _The Lay of the Last Minstrel—_all poetry, indeed, of Scott, followed by the _Tales of a Grandfather,_ which peopled the rivers and burn-sides with his reivers and left the boy with indelible images of the Fairy Queen coming out of Eildon Hill and haunting Carterhough, and the "embattled portal arch" at Newark Tower. And from there it was only a short step to the poems of Robert Burns, since he was a Scot too.

The household shelves were well populated with novels that had been popular when his parents were first courting—Dickens and Scott, Bulwer-Lytton, Captain Thackeray, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, the delightful Marryat, Mrs. Gore, Mrs. Moberly, Miss Pardoe, Paul deKock, Frederika Bremer, and G. P. R. James, besides the Border Minstrelsy, Pope (who, with Shakespeare and Milton, comprised a triumvirate so well known in frontier society that politicians quoted them with the assurance that the electorate would recognize and approve the literary allusions), Prior, Byron, a translation of Ariosto, Longfellow, Lever, Mayne Reid, Dumas. Later came the essays of Lamb and Hazlitt, Miss Sedgwick, Ainsworth, the Brontës, Carlyle, Macaulay, Emerson, DeQuincey, Mrs. Stowe, Hannah Moore, Miss Mulock's _John Halifax, Gentleman,_ even George Sand and Eugene Sue, besides the best works of seventy-odd of the most revered poets of the day. Many of these were suited to a boy's tastes—even the __Orlando,__ in which kings and knights (including Bradamante, the lady warrior) were everywhere, giants, dragons, ogres, and eagles abounded, sword-flashing fights occurred regularly, and someone was always leaping astride the hippogriff and cantering off to the moon. Matt Sherman had also subscribed from the beginning to Robert Bonner's __New York Ledger, __a barrel packed with old issues of which came west with the family in their covered wagon—a fascinating hodgepodge of Mrs. Sigourney's poems, the essays of Fanny Fern, Edward Everett's series of "The Mount Vernon Papers," Bancroft, Halleck, poems by Longfellow, Bryant, and the Cary sisters, exclusive stories by Dickens, Horace Greeley's autobiography in installments, and serials including Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth's romance __The Hidden Hand,__ Leon Lewis's thrilling __Kit Carson's Last Trail,__ Mrs. Stowe, and such Sylvanus Cobb titles as __The Gunmaker of Moscow, Karmel the Scout, The Mystic Bride, The Scourge of Sefton Dale, The Wild Knight, Orion the Goldbeater, The Smuggler of King's Cave, The Painter of Parma, The Brigands of Como, The Scourge of Damascus,__ and __Alaric, or the Tyrant's Vault. __All these Slim sampled as soon as he could understand them (or perhaps slightly earlier). He read _Jane_ _Eyre_ at ten, when it was just out—a creepy story for a boy that age, and Rochester was a mystery and St. John a bore, but he had never forgotten the lonely little girl in her despair, when something came into the room, and her days of starvation at school, and the terrible first Mrs. Rochester. That madwoman who laughed like a hyena and set fire to bed curtains and tore up wedding veils and _bit!—_how had Miss Brontë ever imagined her? _Pickwick_ introduced him to Dickens, and shortly afterward he found the Waverley Novels; best of all _Ivanhoe,_ _Quentin Durward,_ and _The Black Dwarf_. He read Carlyle's _French_ _Revolution, _and Poe, though the stories gave him many a bad night, and _Vanity_ _Fair, _almost as full of memorable scenes and characters as the best of Dickens—the Battle of Waterloo, fat Jos, little George and the pony, little Rowdon and the rat-hunt. From there he went naturally on to the rest of Thackeray, especially the enchanting _Rose and the_ _Ring_, which he read new from the presses at the age of twelve, and _Pendennis,_ his favorite. He discovered that there are people in some novels so vital that you remember them even better than you do the story: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, D'Artagnan, Mr. Micawber, Jeanie Deams in _The Heart of Midlothian, _Becky Sharp, Oliver Twist, Mr. Pickwick, Colonel Newcome, Natty Bumppo, Sairey Gamp, Adam Bede, Jane Eyre, even those like Sidney Carton who die in the end—all as alive as you are, and more alive than some people who think they are, and timeless to boot.

He didn't regret not having had the chance to go beyond the sixth grade, because he'd never really wanted to be anything but a rancher, like his father before him, and he figured that since most of the wisdom and knowledge of the human race was securely tucked away in books, all he had to do (as Pa had said) was find the right ones and he could educate himself on any subject that appealed to him. He'd never had the opportunity to master any other languages, classical or modern, except for Sioux and a listening comprehension of Cheyenne, but most of the surviving authors of the former, and the most popular of the latter, were available in translation. Latin authors, even in English, he detested, dragging through Caesar's _Commentaries,_ the _Eclogues_ of Virgil, and Horace's _Odes _chiefly to please his mother, and Greek ones were even worse—Xenophon, Euripides' _Phoenician Women_—until Homer, especially the _Odyssey, _which he read in the Chapman translation, still as fresh and delightful nearly two centuries after its first appearance as Keats had found it_._ About the same time he was reading the _Lays of Ancient Rome,_ and the _Morte d'Arthur,_ with which he rode at adventure in enchanted forests, entered haunted chapels where a light shone from the Grail, and found the magic boat of Sir Galahad by a lonely mountain mere. But after Homer, Greek writers were no longer tedious. Herodotus was a charming and humorous story-teller, and Thucydides' account of the Sicilian expedition and its ending almost brought tears to his eyes. Almost, but not quite: _that_ honor was reserved for _Uncle Tom's Cabin, _which he read at fourteen, five years after its book publication. Then there were Lucretius and Catullus, courage and wisdom and piety, the bravery of Lamachus, the goodness of Nicias, the brilliance of Alcibiades. Besides these, his appreciation of the outdoors and love of fishing and hunting led him naturally to read _The Moor and the Loch, _Christopher North, and Thomas Tod Stoddart's early books on fly-fishing—_Angling Reminiscences _and _The Art of Angling as Practiced in __Scotland_ (how different, he wondered, could it be elsewhere?).

He shared the fondness of most Americans for Longfellow, and especially delighted in _Hiawatha,_ in the forest life, in Minnehaha, Paupukkeewis, and Nokomis; not far behind ranked the ringing patriotic verse of Campbell. When he sampled Tennyson, a new light of poetry dawned—"The Lotus-Eaters," "Tithonus," _The Idylls of the King_. Yet he wasn't immune, in his teen years, to the sentiment, spice, and thrills of the __New York Weekly,__ whose editors, the two "Francis S's"—Street and Smith—served up a Ledger-esque stew of girls pursued (but never quite caught) by villains, poor boys who managed to overcome all obstacles to achieve wealth, the saccharine pathos of Fanny Fern, serials such as Edward Minturn's "Pearl of the Reef, or The Diver's Daughter" and Dr. J. H. Robinson's "One-Eyed Saul, or The Tory League of Seven," ghost stories, verses, gossip, "A Visit to the Trenton State Prison," and a series of articles headed "Evenings With a Retired Physician" and bearing such titles as "The Opium Eater," "The Victim of Mania-a-Poyu," "The Guillotine," "A Death and a Burial," "The Father's Curse: A Story of Retribution," and "The Blind Boy of the Insane Asylum." Of travel writers (a numerous tribe in that day and age) he liked best Bayard Taylor, who was active from the middle '40's, publishing in less than a decade's time no less than six books about his own wanderings—__Views Afoot, or Europe Seen With Knapsack and Staff, Eldorado: or Adventures in the Path of Empire, A Journey to Central Africa; or, Life and Landscapes from Egypt to the Negro Kingdoms of the White Nile, The Lands of the Saracen; or, Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily and Spain, A Visit to India, ____China, and Japan,__ and __Northern Travel: Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden Denmark, and Lapland—__not to speak of the __Cyclopedia of Modern Travel: A Record of Adventure, Exploration, and Discovery for the Past Fifty Years: Comprising Narratives of the Most Distinguished Travellers Since the Beginning of This Century, __which he compiled in 1856. Taylor was also a scholar of repute (he had issued the first volume of a translation of __Faust __this past year), biographer of Lincoln, editor, journalist, public lecturer, novelist, and poet to the eventual tune of twelve volumes, including __Rhymes of Travel__ and 1855's __Poems of the Orient,__ a book of translations and imitations of Arabic verse that thrilled readers (Slim among them when he discovered it at fourteen, just about the time he was going through a terrific crush on the prettiest girl in his neighborhood) with suggestions of exotic Eastern love, as in the "Bedouin Love Song":

_From the desert I come to thee,  
On a stallion shod with fire,  
And the winds are left behind,  
With the speed of my desire.  
Under thy window I stand,  
And the midnight hears my cry,  
I love thee, I love but thee,  
___ With a love that shall not die...__

And almost as enjoyable as Scott and James were Louise Mühlbach's long series of historical romances, the first of which had appeared in 1839, when she was only twenty-five—more than fifty of them from first to last, in over a hundred volumes—and enjoyed great popularity. In his teens he started seriously discovering books of biography, history, and travel, and after there began to be talk about an Englishman named Darwin, he sought out Charles Lyell's _Principles of_ _Geology _and Robert Chambers's _Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, _poring over them in fascination as he began to see that Reverend Watkins back in Illinois, who'd believed in the "higher criticism," might have been right when he hinted that perhaps the Bible could be interpreted as much allegorically as literally.

Andy's tastes had proved similarly catholic. He read as many as a hundred dime novels in a winter, besides the story papers—the _Ledger,_ the _Weekly,_ the recently-defunct _Mercury, Frank Leslie's Ten Cent Monthly _and _Chimney Corner_—and the much more respectable _Youth's Companion, _a venerable publication dating back to 1827, which both Slim and their mother had also enjoyed. He wandered enchanted from Westerns to historical romances, encountering with delight Indians and wild horsemen, dukes and duchesses and men in iron masks, serving girls who turned out to be daughters of the nobility, and marvellous detectives with charmed lives who always trapped the villains at the end of the story. And even his mother had been forced to admit that, in contrast to the vernacular speech of many of his neighbors, dime-novel heroes and those of authors like Mrs. Southworth used correct grammar and proper diction, and the elevated prose expanded Andy's vocabulary even as he stanched the wounds of Indian arrows or repelled boarders from a sinking frigate.

Like most boys, he reveled in dime-novel melodrama and conflicts between good and evil, villainy and virtue, and loved such "sensational novels" as _The Pirate's Bride, Claude Duval__, _and_ The Wild Rover of the West Indies;_ Anne Bowman's __The Bear Hunters of the Rocky Mountains,__ a romantic tale of a young Englishman who rescued one heroine after another from the Indians; Emerson Bennett's _The Border Rover__, _a blood-and-thunder narrative set in a Kansas of heroic settlers and ferocious Indians, and earlier titles by him, such as _The League of the Miami, The Forest Rose, Leni Leoti, The Bandits of the Osage, _and _The Outlaw's Daughter; _the first star-author of dime novels (not called so in the beginning), Ned Buntline, whose books included _The Black Avenger of the Spanish Main; or, The Fiend of Blood_ (years later, when he read Tom Sawyer, Andy was to recognize with delight the alias Tom adopted for his pirate-play, and know that he must have read that same book), _Magdalena, the Beautiful Mexican Maid__, __The Mysteries and Miseries of New York__, ___The B'hoys of New York, ___The Gals of New York__, __Norwood, or Life on the Prairie__, __Stella Delorme; or, The Comanche's Dream__, __The Rattlesnake; or The Rebel Privateer__,_ and _Life in the Saddle; or The Cavalry Scout__, _all dating from the war years or before, plus more recently his _Quaker Saul: The Idiot Spy__, __War Eagle, or Ossiniwa the Indian Brave, Red Ralph, the Ranger__, _and _Buffalo Bill, King of the Border Men. _ All these he read with delight, as he did tales of Algerian pirates and Algonquin camp-life, "trash fiction" like __The Matricide's Daughter: A Tale of Life in the Great Metropolis, __by Newton Mallory Curtis, __The Rescued Nun, or A Convent and Its Wrongs,__ by "the author of __The Actress Mabel" __(who was in fact Baron St. Leger),__ The Belle of the ____Bowery__ by Osgood Bradbury, and pulse-pounders like Cooper and Mayne Reid, __Ivanhoe__ and __The Three Musketeers—__the "dollar-size dime novels," as his father had called them, that his mother had no objection to. But he also explored the poems of Coleridge, Longfellow, and Bryant, and volumes by Hawthorne, Eliot, Thackeray, Bulwer-Lytton, and above all Dickens and Scott, grand storytellers of an idyllic past and an urban, industrial present, along with Franklin's and Barnum's autobiographies.

At ten he was poring over such classics as __Don Quixote, Robinson ____Crusoe,__ and __The Arabian Nights. __The __McGuffey Readers __gave him a lifelong passion for the English poets from Shakespeare to Byron. _The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit,_ by John Rollin Ridge, might glorify an outlaw, yet the conventional authors weren't immune to similar temptations: James Fenimore Cooper's _The Red Rover _told of a pirate who could abduct gentlewomen with an honorable, if not chivalrous, air, and go down to the angry deep in the ship he loved with rather more than the halo of a martyr, and Lytton's _Paul Clifford_ and Ainsworth's _Rookwood,_ a novel of Dick Turpin, both romanticized crime, more specifically highway robbery by masked riders who held up mail-coaches. He had learned of detectives through _Richmond: Scenes in the Life of a Bow Street Runner, _an 1827 three-decker novel presented as fact; through the 1828-9 _M__é__moires_ of Vidocq, the convict who became head of the French Surété; and through _The Recollections of a Policeman, _by "Waters," published in 1852.

He had his own shelves in the family bookcase, with his own books in them—some inherited from Slim, some received as gifts, and some bought with his own money: Aesop and LaFontaine and Grimm, Dickens's _Child's History of England, Christmas Stories,_ and _The Old Curiosity Shop,_ _Tom Brown's Schooldays, _the Lambs' _Tales from Shakespeare,_ _The Heir of Redclyffe, _a fat green‑covered Andersen with "The Little Mermaid," "The Little Red Shoes," and the creepy "Travelling Companion;" Hawthorne's _Grandfather's Chair, Tanglewood Tales_ in purple covers, with Proserpine and Europa, Theseus, Jason, and Circe, and _The Wonder‑Book_ in green, with the Hammatt Billings pictures of the children on Tanglewood porch, Perseus holding up the Gorgon's head, King Midas, Pandora, the Three Golden Apples, Baucis and Philemon, and the Chimera; Mayne Reid, W. H. G. Kingston, R. M. Ballantyne, the Abbotts. Nearby, at an easily accessible height, were the household copies of his favorites from the grownups' books: the poems of Tennyson and Scott and the Meadows Shakespeare, Dr. John Brown's _Spare Hours, The Last Days of Pompeii, The Pilgrim's Progress, Don Quixote, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pilot, The Spy, Two Years Before the Mast, Robinson Crusoe,_ Mrs. Gaskell's _Cranford, Bracebridge Hall, The Sketch‑Book, Westward Ho!, _La Motte‑Fouque's _Sintram, Undine, _and _Aslauga's Knight, _Longfellow's_ Evangeline, Hiawatha, Hyperion, Kavanagh, _and _Voices of the Night, Lays of Ancient Rome, The Oregon Trail, _Plutarch's _Lives, The Scottish Chiefs, Ivanhoe, Quentin Durward, The Rose and the Ring, The Faerie Queene, Gulliver's Travels, _Marco Polo in the Marsden translation as revised and edited by Thomas Wright in '54. He browsed freely through all of them, and everything from blood-and-thunders to some pretty sophisticated novels. Only last week he'd mentioned to Slim how satisfying he had found an old book by a French gentleman, M. Cyrano de Bergerac, an account of a voyage to the moon, in which there was a great deal of information about matters not generally known; and currently on the lower shelf of the nightstand between their beds was an 1864 Beadle title (borrowed from Joe McCaskey, their neighbor's son), #71, __The Lost Trail,__ whose cover engraving portrayed an Indian stalking through the woods with a white woman borne in his arms, facing back over his shoulder and throwing out her arms as if pleading Heaven for rescue.

So during the winter especially, when there was little range work to do and the family was sometimes isolated from other human contact for days or even weeks at a time, the two brothers occupied themselves primarily with reading, small-scale repair work, chores, regular games of checkers, dominoes, backgammon, and innocuous species of cards—bezique, euchre, rummy, fish, pitch, casino—and the very popular "brain games," including riddles, conundrums, rebuses, word puzzles, and word games based on favorite novels. Andy and Jonesy derived great pleasure from music, singing to the old man's guitar. Slim had decided, too, that this winter he would teach the boy to play chess; he hadn't had anyone to play it with since his mother had died, but he hadn't felt he had the patience—or, to be honest, the bond with his brother—to do it earlier. Jess, he remembered, had promised to start Andy tooling leather, which Slim approved completely; a man ought to have an outlet for his creative impulses—and mankind was a species of creators, like God on a smaller scale, which was perhaps what was really meant by the verse about having been "created in his own image."

Neither Slim nor Andy—nor, for that matter, Jonesy, wise and shrewd as he was—suspected what was going on in the thoughts of the newest member of the household.

**SR**

It was after he came back from Utah Territory in November that Jess started thinking seriously about Christmas—and more importantly, about Christmas presents. His own feelings regarding the approaching holiday were strangely mixed, ranging from quiet nostalgia and bitter regret through a kind of cynicism to a genuine unease over the possibility of being asked to share with the others anything of what it had been like when he was growing up—in part because it hadn't been especially noteworthy, but more because he simply didn't want to be maneuvered into talking about his family, and least of all about what had become of them; even ten years later—going on eleven now—it was still almost too painful a memory to bear. He certainly didn't expect to receive any gifts on his own account. He didn't doubt that, as Slim had already told him, Jonesy and the Shermans would exchange them, but that was different: they were kin, or in Jonesy's case about as near as a man could get—he'd been part of this household for almost as long as Andy had. Jess's own plans were made without any thought of reciprocation.

He understood that Slim had felt obligated to pay for his new winter coat, what with being behind on his pay, and he was grateful for it. But it still __felt__ like a gift, even though he knew it wasn't one, and it seemed only fair that Slim, and Andy, and Jonesy, should get something in return. Even if it wasn't to make up for the coat, their endless kindness, patience, and acceptance deserved some recognition, some thanks, not least of all because of what had happened back on the other side of the mountains. For so long he had felt himself on the outside looking in, but now, especially after Vernal... He was still shy of thinking it, afraid that if he let himself admit it, he'd lose it, but he felt—he _knew_—that this place was his home, and these were his family. And Lord, how he wanted to have a home and a family again. If he had truly found them, even if he was the only one who realized or acknowledged it, there was an obligation on him. If it was their family custom to give gifts, then he had to give some too.

It wasn't a fancy place, Sherman Ranch. You looked around at it and you saw, beyond the careful way Slim tried to keep it up, that it had been built up from scratch and without a lot of money to spare. The house was rough, part plank, part log, some of the logs with the bark still on them, and not big, though bigger by close to a couple of times than the house Jess had been born in; even the chimneybreast wasn't rock-built. The furniture, a lot of it, was obviously handmade—the chairs, the beds in the big bunkroom and the little second bedroom, even the kitchen dresser and the corner cabinet behind the door, though a good cabinetmaker had put those together, with their bevelled door panels. Still, there were touches that gave it warmth and even a whiff of luxury: the prints and pictures on the walls—none large, but all carefully chosen and placed with taste; the tufted "Turkish" leather couch under the window, which had probably run thirty dollars or more when it was new; the bed quilts in their Kentucky spice-pink and red-tomato and Ohio harvest-sun and pioneer-cabin patterns; the colorful rag rugs that lay beside each bed to keep bare feet from getting a chill off the floor first thing in the morning; the transfer-printed china that Slim's ma had chosen years ago—the Harpers had never had anything that good, only a mishmash of graniteware and heavy white crockery.

They'd never had much to spare for Christmas fripperies, either. When you worked shares and had a family of nine youngsters to feed (although in fact there'd never been more than six of them at home: Jess's two big brothers had been out on their own before the three youngest were even born, and Julie, the baby, hadn't made her appearance till big sister Sophie was married and gone), that option didn't exist. The dozen or so Mexican __vaquero__ families who made up most of the permanent crew and staff at Wind Vane Ranch had always made a big thing of the day, which they called __Navidad;__ their season stretched three good weeks, from the sixteenth of December, when the children would begin playing the nine nights of the _Posadas,_ through Christmas Eve (called __Noche Buena,__ or Good Night), when the men enacted __Los Pastores,__ a folk play about the shepherds on their way to see the Holy Family, and Sam Harper's __segundo,__ Holt Maylock, who was married to one of their women, would lead a midnight religious service, giving a homily as laymen were allowed to do in default of a priest (who came by a couple of times a year to perform baptisms and marriages, hear confession, give First Communions, and bless new graves), to Christmas Day, an occasion for both dawn and noontime religious observances and much feasting, visiting, and music, and on to the sixth of January, one of the happiest of all the feast days, and Twelfth Night, when gifts were exchanged. Throughout this period each household would set up __farolitos,__ or little torches, and burn __luminarias,__ as well as having its own __nacimiento,__ or manger scene, however crude, before which the __Posadas__ troupe would pray and sing carols before everyone gave themselves up to dancing, refreshments, and a __pi____ñ____ata__ for the children to break—a gaily-decorated pottery __olla__ filled with candies and trinkets. In the days between Christmas and Twelfth Night the youngsters would go from house to house holding bags and singing for treats, which they always got—pies, candies, fruits, __bizcochitos__ (traditional sugar cookies made with anise), and __bu____ñ____uelos__ (large round fritters sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon).

Like Anglos, Mexicans had certain traditional foods they loved to enjoy at this season. __Tamales___—_corn pockets filled with spicy or sweet ingredients—required considerable work to make, and were therefore generally reserved for special occasions, which made them a favorite holiday food; the simplest were filled with cubed beef, chili sauce, and broth-soaked __masa, __a white flour made from ground hulled corn, but some such combination as beef with green __chilis __(corn was added for a northern specialty), refried beans with cheese, shredded chicken with red __chili__ sauce, pork with pineapple, or pumpkin with raisins, to name but a few possibilities, was preferred, being carefully wrapped in soaked and cleaned cornhusks and steamed in a large pot. A hearty stew called __posole,__ made of corn, pork, and _chilis_, was a standard for Christmas Eve and New Year's Day. The top choice for a special dessert was __tres leche,__ or three-milk, cake—a delicious, buttery sponge cake which was poked all over with small holes and soaked in whole milk or cream, sweetened condensed milk, and evaporated milk. It absorbed the different milky flavors through the holes without getting mushy, and no dinner party or banquet was complete without it, topped with whipped cream and fresh fruit, coconut, or the most popular, _cajeta,_ a caramel sauce made from goat's milk and sugar. As they munched their Christmas __tamales,__ the Mexicans typically sipped __atole,__ a beverage made by blending water, milk, sugar, and masa, which could be drunk warm or cold, though it was typically served hot at Christmas. Fresh fruit, chocolate, __chilis,__ or nuts were often blended with the other ingredients to give a unique flavor and color, and there were many variations, among the most popular of which were thick, brown __champurrado__ (chocolate __atole),__ purple blackberry, sweet and spicy red-chili, pink strawberry, and yellow pineapple. The centerpiece of every Christmas feast was usually turkey __mole,__ the national dish of Mexico; it could contain as many as fifty different ingredients and was very difficult to make, and so was reserved for important occasions. __Mole__ itself was a smooth, dark sauce made from fried __chilis,__ onions, tomatoes, ground nuts and seeds, dried fruits, spices, and a little bit of finely chopped chocolate; it changed color—brown, red, orange—and taste depending on the type of _chilis_ and the other ingredients used, but was always a perfect balance of sweet and spicy. The turkey was boiled and deboned, then combined with all the other ingredients in a large stewpot and allowed to cook for hours.

On the evening of Christmas Day there would invariably be a __fandango__ and yet another __pi____ñ____ata.__ This party the Harpers always attended out of politeness, but it was, after all, a Catholic observance, and they were Protestants—and the foreman's family besides; Jess and his sibs were firmly given to understand that, while it was quite acceptable to be friends with the Mexican children, to play with them after chores were done, and to work side by side with them as one grew older, scrambling in the ruins of the __pi____ñ____ata __with them was beneath one's dignity as an Anglo and the child of one's father—not to speak of a mother who had been a Cooper! They'd usually manage a bit of a feast—they'd slaughter a beef and roast the shoulder, and then they'd eke it out with whatever game the boys were able to bring in, usually venison or wild turkey (the former always roasted with honey and grape leaves for a special tang, the latter served Texas-style with hot, spicy sausages and cornbread dressing), maybe a baked ham or a stuffed roast goose if the year had been especially successful, plus mashed sweet potatoes laced with wild honey, Spanish onions boiled in cream and glazed in butter, stuffed peppers, black-eyed peas and grits, special cornbread baked with onion tops and sweet clabber, whatever kind of pickles and preserves Jess's ma had been able to put by, always pies—they might only be mustang-grape or sandhill-plum, but they'd be there. Plum duff, too, if the wild plums had been good, and roast pecans after. Holt Maylock and his family would come over, and Pa would make eggnog as Texans did it, with the whites and yolks of the eggs, sugar, whiskey, brandy, and new milk to thin it, and they'd tell stories of old times back in East Texas. If any strangers happened by, they were always invited to share in the best the household had: no frontier Texan could conceive of allowing a baby to be born in a cold manger, no matter how crowded their own homes or border-town inns might be, and generous hospitality was an unwritten law. But the family observance never included presents, except for the special gingerbread cookies in various shapes that Ma always made; and there was no Christmas tree, although they knew about them—there were many Germans in Texas, who had brought the custom with them from the Old Country, and Ma and Pa had encountered it farther east and south, around Santone and the Hill Country.

It wasn't that they were trying to imitate old Scrooge. It was just that Pa got paid once a year—being on shares, he had to wait till the cattle were sold and the bills for the ranch paid—and though he did the best he could for his family, there were so many Harpers in the house that there wasn't much to go around once the necessary supplies for the year had been laid in: food staples, lamp oil, powder and lead, dry goods for clothes, replacements for worn-out things. New shoes (or boots)—always bought big enough to last through the next four seasons—came in the fall when there was a little cash; toys were chiefly crude homemade efforts, mostly by Jess's older brothers till they left home, looking for better lives, later by Jess himself as he mastered the art of whittling. He hadn't heard from or of either Ben or Jake in—well, since before the Bannisters. Moreover, Amarillo lay seventy-five miles distant—much too far for casual shopping expeditions, especially in December, when a blue norther with genuinely Arctic winds might blow up at almost any moment. The ranch had a "store" (more accurately a warehouse) of its own, where the vaqueros and their families could draw against their meager pay for staple foods, dry goods, shoes, knives, pottery, religious items, and whatever else they might need between the arrival of the November freight caravan and the spring one in March or April. But most of the things it stocked were made to ethnic tastes (like _sombreros) _or more or less cheap and tawdry, for vaqueros in Texas, as in their homeland, were routinely paid no more than eight to twelve dollars a month; they owned their little houses and their garden plots for as long as they worked on the place, their small livestock—poultry, pigs, goats—and the men their guns and saddles, but little else. So the Harpers rarely used it, although Ma, who had been to school, kept its accounts and received a half-share of the profits for her trouble. Music was mostly Ma humming or singing, if she felt up to it and Pa wasn't around; not that he didn't hold with it (he played the mouth harp himself), but that as he got older and more discouraged he was usually tired or sometimes liquored and just didn't want to be bothered with it. Jess hadn't even had a saddle of his own till he was twelve; that was part of why he was such a good bareback rider, that and having been taught by a halfbreed boss wrangler—he'd herded cavvy from the age of ten, sure, but he'd had to do it with borrowed gear, and the rest of the time, like when he went meat-hunting, there was nothing between him and the horse's back but his hand-me-down britches and maybe a blanket and surcingle. The very first thing he'd gotten himself, when he got released from the U.S. Volunteers after the war, had been a saddle, a good sixty-dollar saddle, and he'd felt like the King of England and the Sultan of Araby put together. He was still riding that saddle.

So Jess had become accustomed, as he grew, to a fairly meager holiday, and having never known anything else, the lack didn't really bother him; you couldn't miss what you'd never had. And after he lost his family, it became even bleaker, particularly during the war. One reason for the high morale that existed to the end in the Army of Northern Virginia was the relative efficiency of the military postal service: letters might be weeks late in coming, but in the end they always came—but not to Jess, who had no one left to write any, except Francie, and would have had a hard time getting them even if she'd known how to reach him by then, once Vicksburg fell and Texas was cut off from the remainder of the Confederacy. Hearing other soldiers reading aloud from_ their_ home letters only made his loneliness more bitter and heartbreaking by comparison. Hardness, at least on the outside, had been a natural defense. And after that came five years in the Big Open, mostly as a gun for hire, without even a partner as permanent as Dixie Howard had been. Through these experiences, the notion had taken root in him that, not only did you have to work for what you got, but you should neither expect nor ask others to contribute. In any way.

He knew that for many people it was different: in the course of his drifting he'd worked for families who had money to spare, who believed in big Christmas feasts and generous gifts, and had seen—at a distance—something of the observances of others. But none of them had ever made him a part of it.

Of course, none of them had ever treated him like family, either.

Jess had grown up fast, out of necessity; everybody did, on the frontier, but poor kids more than the generality. Looking back, it sometimes seemed to him that he'd never really had the chance to be a kid; maybe that was why his high spirits kept on breaking out, like that time in Ellsworth; maybe it was why he felt such sympathy toward Andy, such a need to act, sometimes, as a buffer between him and hard-working, straight-arrow, duty-first-everything-else-tenth Slim, who didn't always seem to understand (though Jess had to admit that he was a lot closer to doing so now than he'd been when they first met) that a boy needed a chance to _be_ a boy, to dream, to play, to not be worrying all the time about grown-up things or thinking how much he wanted to just get away. Jess understood that, precisely because he'd been denied it; he saw a lot of himself in Andy. Maybe, too, it was why he was resolved to make sure that Andy had a special Christmas. After all, he'd already seen, to his bitter disappointment, that his past didn't seem inclined to leave him be, and if you kept on throwin' the dice you were sure to come up snake eyes soon or late: this might be the only one they'd have together. And if he was going to make Andy's Christmas special, it was only fair that he should do likewise for Slim and Jonesy—Slim almost more than any of them; it was Slim who'd invited him to stay, offered him the job, and not only that, but given him the privilege of eating at the family table and sleeping in the main house, not the bunkhouse. Jess had never said so, on account of not being schooled or eloquent, but that had been almost enough to suffocate him with surprise... and happiness. He wanted to do something to show how much he appreciated everything they'd done. How better than with some fine gifts? Not like he needed his money for much of anything, now that his outfit was bought. 'Course he didn't have but about $230 left...

How much would he need, to make the day really special? He thought about what they might like to have. Slim? That was easy. A rancher, and still more a relay-station operator who needed to know when the stage was due and whether it was late, should have a watch. Matt Sherman had had one, a good sixty-dollar stem-winder that chimed the hours, but Slim had decided it ought to go to Andy: Andy had only had his father for five-going-on-six years, and Slim had had him till he was grown, so to make up for that lost time Andy should have the watch. A fine handsome pocket watch, that was the thing. Benson had some in his store, solid coin-silver cases with gold inlay, which made a beautiful effect; they ranged from eighteen dollars for a seven-jewelled Trenton model to $81.50 for a seventeen-jewel Special Railway Hampden. There was one Jess had seen that had a picture on the case of a stallion standing on a rise with its mane and tail flying—Slim appreciated good horseflesh, he'd like that one. And just about mid-range, too, a seventeen-jewel Crescent Street Waltham; Jess knew Waltham watches were good ones. Forty-seven dollars. There ought to be a chain for it, too, something suitable to its price: maybe the solid gold one with the alternating engraved and plain polished links; that was another fourteen.

Jonesy, now... Jonesy was a plain sort of man. He'd want something useful. Suspenders; two or three of those print shirts he liked; a new pair of carpet slippers; a new pipe; a good supply of quality tobacco. Maybe a watch chain and a charm or two for it. Maybe some duck decoys, then he could get them some nice duck dinners in season with his old shotgun. And something for the kitchen—maybe that icebox he'd talked about, if it would be possible to get it freighted in before Christmas; Benson would probably know what one it was, or if he didn't, would know how to find out.

But Andy—what to get for Andy? It had been a long time since Jess had had any kind of close acquaintance with a twelve-year-old boy; the last one had been his brother Johnny, the only one of the younger boys who'd escaped the fire. And Johnny, like the rest of the Harpers, hadn't owned very much. Jess thought about the things his brother had dreamed of, had looked at hungrily on the rare occasions when he got into town. Andy was a range kid, so his tastes would probably run the same way Johnny's had. A set of fishing gear would please him... or maybe a fine bridle, with silverwork on it... or a pair of spurs; he'd be thirteen on the sixth of December, that was more than old enough for them. Shoot, all three, why not?—if Jess was going to be spending sixty dollars on Slim, he shouldn't be a piker with the other two.

A hundred and eighty, then, give or take. And he'd get his wages for November at the beginning of the month, which would bring him up to $260. It would be enough.

And so it happened that, on the first Saturday in December (which happened to be the third of the month), after Slim had cashed the regular check from the stage line and counted out his pay, Jess went shopping.

He had his savings cached in the top of his left boot, where there was a little pocket in the lining for that purpose, and he'd already planted the idea that he might stay in town a little late, find a good poker game, maybe. He walked around town a while, checking out the stock in the various stores and between times keeping an eye on the Sherman buckboard parked in front of Benson's, and when he saw that it wasn't there any more, he headed that way.

Laramie was dressed for the coming holiday, since nobody could be sure of the weather after the middle of November, and the people from the outlying ranches and farms wanted to get their shopping done early, even if it meant having to wrack their brains for creative hiding places for presents. Red paper balls, artificial flowers, festoons of drapery, and sprigs of mistletoe decorated the store windows, joined by an occasional Santa; red and green and golden bells and streamers of red and green paper chains hung around the walls, and trimmings of evergreen and cranberries wherever they could be put; Benson's displayed a Christ Child in a manger in its window, and it seemed that every other awning post held a placard reminding everyone of the town Christmas party, to be held in the Fire Department's second-storey meeting-room beginning at seven P.M. on the 24th __(Recitations – Dialogues – Songs – Visit by Santa Claus – Dance &amp; Barbecue – Community Carol Sing!)__ Christmastime merchandise was prominently in place in Benson's: barrels and boxes of candy, jute bags of coconuts and English walnuts rolled down to display their contents, boxes of figs, crates of oranges leaned end-up against the counters, extra supplies of extracts, nutmegs, raisins, and currants, citron, oyster crackers, mincemeat, and gift goods of the generally accepted kind, such as were called "comforts" in the language of the day—anything a step or two removed from what a person might actually need to keep body and soul together: premium chocolates, handsome stationery, chromos, fancy china, cut and molded glassware, shaving mugs, mustache cups, three-to-six-piece toilet sets, silver-plate cigar cases, pincushions, needlework holders in novelty shapes, "memory books," velvet picture albums with mirrors inset in their covers, Japanese paper fans, fountain pens, stickpins, brass-handled umbrellas, scarves of the latest pattern and weave, glove boxes and handkerchief cases, notions and trinkets and bric-a-brac, all the way up to fur muffs, men's and ladies' cloaks, brass carpet-rods for staircases, bronze knickknacks, even silk smoking-jackets and a sewing machine or two, and of course toys, all competing for the limited space with the usual kinds of year-round stock, most particularly steelware, "fancy goods," and dry goods.

The place was crowded with customers, even more than Jess had become accustomed to during the warm weather; in spring and summer and early fall people could often let their shopping go for a week or so, but not now, when snow might put a period to all travelling at any moment. Jock Benson and his sister Marcie were doing their best to cope with the deluge, helped by a couple of part-time clerks. Jess waited till Jock seemed to have a breather in between, then stepped up to the counter. "Need to talk to you, Mr. Benson, if you can find a minute."

"Well, considering the money you and Slim dropped for that winter outfit of yours, you're officially a good customer, Jess, and I guess I can find it now. What do you need?" the storekeeper asked.

Jess leaned confidentially over the counter. "You know how I bought Miss Essie's piano for Jonesy, right? Well, he's been talkin' about an icebox too. You know anything about that?"

"You bet I do," Benson agreed. "He'd have to order it through me or the hardware store; we don't carry 'em on hand."

"S'pose I wanted to order it for him," Jess suggested. "Could it get here in time for Christmas?"

Benson thought about it. "Well, I can telegraph the manufacturer—they're headquartered in Chicago. If I send the wire Monday, they'll have the order by Tuesday. They'll ship it by rail to Cheyenne, since that's the closest station to us, and I can send somebody over with a wagon to get it, though I'll have to charge you for his expenses—that's a good day's trip each way, he'll need to spend the night. As long as it doesn't snow, the train can make the trip from Chicago in about two days' time. Of course you can't count on that, but I can ask them to get it off as early as they can, and that'll give us some leeway just in case. If they ship it out Thursday by first class freight, and the weather doesn't turn bad out on the plains, it'll get into Cheyenne no later than next Saturday morning. Then I can get it over the pass and back here by the middle of the next week—that'll be the fourteenth. Ten days' maneuvering room. Yeah, I think we can do it, Jess."

"You got a picture of it, maybe?" Jess asked. "Slim told me the one Jonesy wants runs thirty dollars."

"I know which one he means," the storekeeper said. "Hold on a minute. I've got the catalogue on the shelf over my desk—big goods like that, they don't send drummers, 'cause there's no way they could carry samples." He vanished into his "office," which was simply a railed-off area at the back of the store, behind a little latticework swinging gate, and came back with a booklet of about a hundred pages, illustrated with engravings. Jess was surprised at first to see that it was a furniture-and-cabinetmakers' catalogue, but when he saw the pictures of the iceboxes he understood: they looked very much like blanket chests or upright cabinets, depending on the size. "Here," said Benson, "this is the one Jonesy's been looking at. Forty inches wide, twenty-four deep, forty-nine high, double doors, and partitions between the provision chambers. There are bigger ones, as you can see on the facing page, but they're mostly for grocers and hotels and such. This model sells at $30.94, but I'll let you have it for thirty even, which is what I'd have charged Slim. First-class freight adds another $5.43, and I'll have to have the full sum up front."

It was his entire month's pay and some over, but he'd already resolved not to be a piker. "I got thirty in my pocket and more in my boot. Mind if I go in the back room and get it out in private? It's kinda my emergency stash, I don't like everybody knowin' where I keep it."

"Go ahead. I'll start writing out the order," said Jock.

Five minutes later Jess was back with three twenty-dollar gold certificates in his hand. "Here y'are. Take out another dollar for the telegram, it shouldn't run no more'n that, I reckon."

"Fair enough. But you got a little too much here, Jess. You only need to give me forty, and I'll owe you $3.57 change."

"How about you take off another ten," Jess suggested, "and put away one of them Waltham watches with the horse on the lid. I could pay the whole price now, but I ain't wantin' nobody to come across their presents too far ahead of time, and they might if I was to take 'em back to the ranch this early."

"But Jonesy's got a watch already," Jock pointed out.

"Ain't for him, it's for Slim. And I'll be wantin' a chain for it too."

Benson's eyebrows rose. "Sounds like you're figurin' to make this a pretty special Christmas."

"You got that right," said Jess, "and you keep it quiet, hear? I'm fixin' to surprise 'em good."

The storekeeper grinned suddenly. "Jess, I tell you, I know more about what folks are getting for Christmas in these parts than Santy Claus himself does. Show me which chain you want and I'll make sure to put that aside too."

Jess snorted softly in amusement. "Reckon likely you do at that." Then he sobered. "How are you gonna know when the shipment makes Cheyenne?"

"Oh, that's easy," said Benson with a shrug. "I've got an arrangement with the freight agent there. Any time something comes in for me and he knows my regular freight run's not due to be making up, he just slips a note onto the Laramie stage. If you want, I can ask Mose to let you know when I hear from him."

But Jess shook his head. "Maybe better not. I like Mose, but he's got a way of lettin' things slip that he hadn't ought to. Christmas Day'll be—which day of the week?"

"Sunday this year. Three weeks from tomorrow." Jock indicated the calendar hanging over his desk, with the _25_ emphasized in red.

"Then I'll make an excuse to get away from the house that Thursday," Jess decided, "and pick up the watch and the rest of the small stuff, and we'll work out how to get the icebox out."

**SR**

Most adults of the westering era were hopelessly sentimental when it came to children, particularly their own (perhaps because of the high juvenile-mortality rate), and even those who believed in "moderation in all things" were apt to occasionally celebrate the fact that the child had made it to another birthday with lavish parties. Slim's and Andy's birthdays, however, were so close to Christmas—barely a month apart—that Matt and Mary Sherman had found it easier to simply double up on holiday presents, though each of the boys had always gotten a special birthday supper, with a cake, and a small remembrance or two. Jonesy was better at pies, but for Andy's birthday, the sixth of December, he made some frosted chocolate muffincakes, a batch of sugar-frosted cookies with a raisin in the middle of each, and the boy's favorite dish, steak with onions fried in butter and crusty raw-fried "cowboy" potatoes. This, according to household tradition, marked the real beginning of the Christmas season.

Slim and Jonesy consulted about gifts for Andy and Jess; Andy conferred with Jonesy about what to put in Slim's and Jess's stockings, and with Slim about Jonesy's. None of them thought to discuss with Jess what he planned to get for any of the others, because none of them was completely sure he felt settled enough—especially after the Hamry business—to want to take so intimate a part in their Christmas observances. And it never occurred to Jess that they might want to exchange gifts __with__ him, not simply receive them __from__ him. After all, he was only a hired hand.

Thursday morning, three days before Christmas, he asked at breakfast, "You got anythin' particular in mind needs doin' today, Slim?"

The rancher thought it over for a moment. "I think it's about time we got the brood mares and their colts down off the high pasture. I usually leave 'em up there longer than I do the beef; horses can paw through the snow for grass, which cattle can't on account of their cloven hooves, and they've got the instinct to eat it for drink. But those colts, some of 'em, are still only five or six months old, and I don't want to wait any longer about movin' 'em. Plus if there happens to be a lion around—not that we've seen sign of any, these last couple of seasons—they'll be safer down in the northwest quadrant, nearest the Stone Creek line cabin."

"You reckon you could do that by yourself?" Jess asked. "I'm thinkin' somebody'd ought to go out and get Jonesy his turkey, or there won't be nothin' on the table Christmas Day but side dishes."

"Glad somebody thought of that," Jonesy growled. "I was beginnin' to wonder if I'd have to take care of it myself."

"There'll be a ham," Slim said. "We always have one. But you're right, we shouldn't keep putting it off. Were you thinkin' of doin' it?"

"Yeah," Jess agreed, "I been ponderin' where they might be holin' up for winter, and I reckon I know where to find one; like you said, I know this spread as good as you do now. Maybe I'll get two or three if I can—won't hurt none to have 'em, we can hang 'em up in the woodshed and they'll freeze. Maybe if I get lucky I can even take down another deer or a young elk. Best to stockpile some fresh meat while we can still get around, from what you all've told me about winter in these parts."

"Better take a packhorse, in that case," Slim suggested.

The Texan nodded. "I was plannin' on it."

"Either of you want me to go along?" Andy inquired.

"You'd better stay here," Slim told him. "We'll cover the first stage, and we should both be back in time for the last, since it'll be dark by then, but Jonesy will need help with the other two."

"Yeah," said Jess. "Some other time you and me 'll go huntin' and make a day of it, Tiger. But Slim's right—better not today."

"Okay," Andy consented, not arguing about it, and went back to his fried eggs and sausage cakes. "I'll get in some more wood in between times."

"Take some time for your lessons too," Slim reminded him, though inwardly he was pleased to see that the boy wasn't begging. __Guess he's growin' up, __he thought.

It had snowed two or three days earlier; in the yard the continual movement of people, stages, and stock had trampled it down, and the stage road was the one in the county that the commissioner of roads always made sure to keep rolled if it was humanly possible, but once away from these, the earth was hidden under a blanket of white three or four inches deep. Slim made his way carefully up into the higher pasture where his twenty or thirty brood mares and their colts had been living ever since late May. Up here, where the breeze was more dependable, they were less troubled by stinging flies, and timber where they could shelter on the hottest days was easy to find: in the height of summer they would remain in it all day and come out to graze at night. They were also a respectable distance from the meadows he used as summer range for the cattle: cattle chewed a cud, so they stuffed every bit of graze in sight, eating fast, and especially if they outnumbered the horses, grazing the two species together could result in the latter getting crowded out and shorted; a single cow, spending eight hours out of every twenty-four feeding, could consume as much as 155 pounds of grass in that time, where horses of the size Slim raised, mustang-quarter crosses running about 875 pounds weight, both needed less to begin with (a horse could eat his fill, on fair-to-good graze, in three one-hour stints a day) and liked to nibble slowly over the course of the day, grazing as often after dark as before sundown, while cattle generally preferred to lie down and sleep.

The stallion, Headlight, caught Slim's scent and whistled a greeting. The mares, most of them, were beginning to show the rounding of next spring's foals growing inside them, but their colts from this year were still running with them—it would be easier to wean them after Christmas, once the whole herd was down in the lowlands and they could be fenced away from their mothers. Slim circled the animals easily, counting as he went, making sure none were missing, and when he had them bunched started them down the mountain. Headlight, accustomed to this routine, pitched in to help, and the older mares knew it meant a return to sheltered range and lined out willingly; the colts made little feints and dashes here and there, racing with one another, enjoying the way the snow exploded out from under their hooves, but they always circled back eventually, so Slim ignored their antics, letting their sire go after them if they started getting too far away.

He kept the herd moving steadily, but not too fast; in this weather they shouldn't get sweaty, since it could lead to bad chills after they stopped, and in any case there were too many places on the downslope where the snow might hide bad ground, and he didn't want them stumbling or falling. It was two o'clock by the sun before he got them down across the Old Laramie Road, through the upper fence and into the northeast pasture. This was a good-sized one, a full section, enough to support a bunch this size for a full year if required, sloping down from steep ridges on the north and east that would block off or blunt the worst of the winter winds, with several patches of open timber, mostly evergreens, to provide shelter, and besides Stone Creek, which ran roughly north-south at a distance of about half a mile from the fence line and the stage road, there were a couple of spring-ponds that never froze. He left them to settle themselves on the new range, and took advantage of being alone to attend to something else he'd been thinking about.

Like most long-time horsemen, Slim never gelded his colts till they were two years old, or at least coming up on it. This meant splitting the youngsters up the spring after they were weaned, banishing the fillies to one pasture and the colts to another, far enough apart that neither bunch could get the other one's scent and decide to go visiting, and also far enough from their sire that he wouldn't come looking, either for a fight or to force them into his band: Matt Sherman had always said that while a cow could begin bearing healthy calves at the age of two, a mare should go till she was three. The going-on-two-year-old colts were at the awkward gangly stage, just like human teenagers, and were currently living on a quarter-section on the far side of Home Creek, till they grew up enough to look like horses. The fillies were up in the northeast quarter of the low range, upwind of where their sire was now. Slim headed that way.

He had swung by to check on each bunch after the first good snowfall, to see whether they'd remembered what their dams had taught them about winter foraging—and also because he'd begun to think that a young horse like these would make a good Christmas present for Jess. It would be something he'd appreciate, with his eye for horseflesh, and an anchor to hold him at the ranch too, since it couldn't be broke till spring after next, or ridden regularly for another year past that. There was one half-grown filly he'd especially liked the looks of, even at this age: glossy black, naturally light-footed, with the deep bottom and fine legs that indicated the ability to lope all day. Her ears were active and constantly moving, a sign of mental alertness, and her back was short and barely curved, which suggested strength. The line from her poll to the end of her nose was level, almost aristocratic, and her head tapered down a little to give her muzzle a dainty look. He'd pegged her at fifteen hands two—neither big nor small, but just about right. Ordinarily he'd have made certain to keep her for breeding purposes, though breeding a mare back to her sire or a brother could be tricky if you didn't know what you were doing. But over the weeks since his last sight of her, he hadn't been able to get the picture of her out of his head. He found her feeding with her sisters and checked at a distance from the bunch, looking her over again. This was the one. Somehow he knew that she and Jess would suit each other.

He scattered the herd a bit, and when they began to spread out, took down his lariat and went after the black. She thought it was a game at first and gave him a bit of a chase, and she wasn't rope-broke either: as a weanling, last winter, she'd learned to bear handling, but the unfamiliar singing of the rope disturbed her and set her running. Rather than make her fight a noose, he let that suffice, keeping up pressure from behind and twirling the loop steadily at his side. She wasn't especially happy about leaving her sisters, but Alamo was older and more experienced than she was, and whenever she tried to dodge or double back, he was there ahead of her. Eventually, with the chestnut's help, Slim got her into the top part of the home pasture, and from there it wasn't hard to find the _remuda,_ where the geldings welcomed her happily, on the same behavioral principle that made them cleave to a bell-mare. Satisfied that the company would keep her occupied and content, he turned homeward, taking it easy and working out in his mind how to get her down to the barn without Jess seeing her.

__That does it, __he told himself as he rode, pleased that he'd assembled suitable gifts for everyone in the household, and made a bountiful season of it too, thanks to his share of the reward for Bud Carlin. Admittedly it was getting difficult to decide what to give his kid brother, especially now that Slim was almost completely resolved to send the boy East to school next year. Andy was too old for most toys, though Slim and Jonesy, consulting over the question earlier this month, had figured a telescope and a pair of ice skates would be more or less ageless and could be enjoyed after classes and on weekends. And a pair of boxing gloves: some boxing people were talking about gloves to protect a fighter's hands, which often got so swollen before the fight had gone far that he feared to hit as hard as possible, but fighting was still bare-knuckled. All the same, not everyone who boxed was a professional fighter. Slim remembered the visit he'd made to Brooklyn with a fellow officer during the war, and how his friend had invited him along to the gymnasium he belonged to, where a well-known English pugilist taught boxing as a gymnastic art and manly science, not to be confused with the brutal sport of prizefighting—and insisted on gloves. There was a telegraph instrument, too: learning Morse code would be good mental exercise for the boy, and a telegrapher could make $25 to $100 a month—good money, mostly—although it was Slim's hope that Andy would choose one of the more prestigious professions, ideally law.

Jess had casually mentioned once that buckskin was the best thing a body could have on when it was windy, and Slim was inclined to believe him: he'd seen his Cheyenne friends venture out in the worst kind of winter weather wearing only shirts and leggings made of it—no cloth shirts, no underwear, just maybe a blanket or a wolfskin coat. So he'd stopped at the haberdashery in town to purchase a stitched buckskin coat worked with red and blue beads and lined with flannel blanket cloth. With a wolfskin cap and a new muffler and mittens, it would be practical and useful even back East. And a few package games could be used to attract friends at the school. There'd had to be some small things for the boy's stocking, too. But mostly the two men had thought in terms of books. Having been brought up by a reading mother, Andy had always liked to read, and seeing Slim doing it and enjoying it had encouraged him to think it a manly sort of leisure.

Another light sprinkle of snow was falling as Alamo paused at the top of the little bluff that overlooked the yard, lowered his head as Slim eased the reins, and found his way to the head of the switchback path that led down the face. It was totally obscured by the snow, but the chestnut felt his way down it, skidding a little in places, with Slim leaning back in the saddle to help him balance. A light wind sent the gray smoke from the chimney streaming off to the south, and there was a warm golden glow from the kitchen window. __Home,__ Slim thought, as Alamo reached the level, and wondered once again whether Jess had anything like the same feeling for it. __He must, or why would he keep comin' back?__

He leaned out of the saddle to lift the bar on the gate, swung it in and pulled it closed behind him as Alamo walked quietly through, attention already fixed on the welcoming barn. The snow in the yard had been disturbed recently, which told Slim that the three o'clock outbound had been through. It would be getting dark early, with the weather; he hoped Jess would make it back before much longer.

**SR**

Jess had taken Traveller and a packhorse and gone in exactly the opposite direction from Slim, making for a low area where scrub-oak, juniper, and hawthorn grew thickly, offering the acorns and berries that turkeys need, with tangles of wild grape, thickets of plum-brush, and solitary dogwoods for variety and shelter. At this season the mature gobblers lived apart from the hens and young, feeding morning and evening and roosting in trees the rest of the time. Jess had borrowed Jonesy's shotgun, and after tying his horses securely in a good sheltered spot, he worked his way cautiously and quietly into the patch, eyeing the branches above and ahead, until he spotted three dark, bulky forms seated in a row about twenty feet up and half as many yards away. He stopped and slowly lowered himself to one knee behind a screen of grapevines, not wanting the wily, sharp-eyed birds to catch sight of him, and fitted a pair of shells, loaded with number-two fowling shot, into the barrels. He had been hunting one kind of game or another since he was strong enough to keep both ends of a long gun off the ground, and he'd more than once brought down seven sitting ducks at a time with a single blast; he figured one turkey would be just about the equivalent. He raised the gun to his shoulder, pressed it in, used his eye to substitute for the nonexistent rear sight, took a breath and held it and squeezed the right trigger. There was a roar and the gun bucked, slamming back; he didn't wait, but re-levelled it immediately and let go with the other barrel. The second turkey blew off the branch before the first hit the ground. Number three took off, but Jess, without even looking to see what he was doing, broke the gun, shoved in two fresh loads, and fired again—both barrels this time, to increase the likelihood that some of the shot would score. Some of it did; the bird jinked, flew on a few lopsided beats, then spiralled to earth. Jess let his breath out, grinning, and got to his feet. In short order he'd gathered his kills, well-grown young birds which he estimated would run some short of sixteen pounds and a half per, that being about the average weight for wild turkey cocks, though the barnyard kind ran bigger—as much as twenty-five dressed—thanks to dependable feeding. He stuffed them into a game-bag and turned back to where he'd left the horses.

Traveller nickered softly as his human friend came in sight. "Yeah, feller, I got 'em," Jess told him. "Now, let's get ourselves into town and pick up some other things." He figured that, with what he'd said about maybe trying for some bigger game in addition to the turkeys, nobody would be too surprised if it took him the best part of the day to get back.

As might have been expected on a Thursday, things in Laramie were pretty quiet, with only town-dwellers and a few close-in farmers on the streets. Jess made straight for Bensons' store, where he paid off Slim's watch and chain, chose a chain of the simple "small Boston link" style and a couple of charms for Jonesy, and discussed delivery of the icebox with Jock. "I'm thinkin' I can hide her in the barn a couple nights; Jonesy don't go in there much this time of year, by what I've seen," he said. "It'll be best if your man goes out Cemetery Road and crosses the ridge to come in the back way; if he takes the stage road and comes over Stone Creek somebody's sure to see him drivin' into the yard and get to wonderin' what's up. Anyhow, Cemetery's shorter, even though it's got a steeper grade—and on sleigh runners that shouldn't make the difference it does with wheels."

Benson nodded agreement. "Sure, I see what you're thinking. What do you figure, send him in timed to get there about halfway between a couple of stages? If there's one in the yard, you and Slim'll both be running around taking care of it, and you won't want to stop to help offload. Jonesy won't see, he'll be inside serving out coffee and whatnot, and I don't suppose it'll hurt anything if Slim does, but still..."

"I don't want even Slim seein'," Jess told him, "or he might get suspicionin' that he's on my list too. Yeah, that sounds good. Get him in maybe half-past one, I reckon; that'll leave him plenty of light to get home by."

"Done," said Jock. "You want a look at her first? I put her in one of the sheds out back—she's still crated up, but we can pry some of that off with a crowbar."

Jess nodded eagerly. He'd already known that the box had been safely delivered—he'd confirmed that when they came in last Saturday—but with the weekend shoppers taking up the storekeeper's attention, he hadn't wanted to ask to see it. Jock called Marcie to watch the store and pulled on his overshoes and heavy brown woollen coat.

Jess watched as the storekeeper attacked the crate with his crowbar, ripping off four or five of the slats until the front of the box was revealed. "She's a beauty," he breathed as the polished ashwood box, with its handsome vertical and horizontal bands of carving, came into view. The twin brass handles gleamed in the light filtering in from outside the shed, and even the iron casters on the four stubby legs had a muted shine. Jess peeled off a glove and rubbed his hand against the smooth wooden surface. "Yeah," he sighed, "she'll do, sure 'nough."

Jock Benson had grown up in range country and knew that those two simple words were about the highest praise a cowboy could give. "Figured you'd think so," he said. "All right, then, I'll send her over tomorrow, early afternoon. Like a cup of coffee?"

"You bet," Jess agreed, but he was already deep in thought; the icebox would go a long way toward putting Jonesy on an equal footing with Slim, gift-wise, and he knew what to get to finish the job, but he still wasn't quite certain what to get for Andy beyond the things he had in mind to pick up at the saddle shop.

Back in the store, Jock shed his winter gear and poured coffee. Jess sipped his slowly, his eyes roving around the crowded sales room of the store in his usual ever-alert-to-his-surroundings mode, then settling suddenly on a peculiar-looking object set out on a tin tray on top of the fancy-goods case. Curious, he wove his way past the tables of clothing that filled the center of the floor and went for a closer look. Benson, ever alert to the possibility of a sale, circled around behind the counters to keep up.

Jess cautiously touched the contraption, which looked light and fragile but proved to be fairly sturdily fashioned of walnut and black leather. He met Jock's eyes, a question in his own. "It's a stereoscope, Jess," the storekeeper explained. "See, this here is what they call a 'view.' " He bent down to retrieve it from a box on a shelf in the enclosed base of the case.

The Texan frowned, puzzled. "Just looks like a couple of tintypes side by side."

"It is. But see what happens when you put it in the bracket and look at it through the scope."

Gingerly, not sure he wasn't being played a trick on, Jess took the thing and held it up to his eyes. "Well, I'll be dad-gummed!" he breathed. "Would you look at that! It don't look like tintypes no more. It looks like—like it's real. Like you're lookin' at it from away far off, but right out in the open."

"That's right," Benson agreed. "That's what the lenses in the viewer do to it. It's called 'three-dimensional'—means it's got height, and breadth, and__depth.__ You can get all kinds of views for 'em—landscapes, historical ruins, interiors of famous houses, birthplaces of noted people, public buildings, notable parks and cemeteries, impressive public works like the Philadelphia Water Works, recent archaeological digs, scenic spots, famous people, views of the Indians of Canada, Mexico, and the West, great natural calamities, artworks in famous museums, and contemporary ones like Rogers groups. The ones that seem to move best are the Bible scenes and the travel pictures, though we do pretty well on the comic subjects and the photographs of actresses too, and the scenes of battlefields from the war sell in quantities I wouldn't have believed till I saw it."

"Travel," said Jess at once, seeing the solution to his dilemma. "That's the thing. That's what Andy'd love. What you got?"

"Well, let's see. The supplier I mostly deal with offers a line of what they call picturesque points of America, a hundred different ones of those... and the principal cities, fifty of them... and picturesque points of Europe and Africa, there's another fifty, and cities of Europe, twenty-five. They go for thirty-seven cents each, three dollars if you buy 'em in dozen lots—that's a one-third saving—or $3.82 for the hand-colored ones."

"If I got one of each, how much would that be?" Jess asked, making his decision with hardly a thought.

"Well, it's 225 different views, that's just under nineteen dozen. Give you a deal on 'em, though, if you take the whole assortment and the best of the viewers. Walnut frame, usually sells for a dollar-eighty. Regular price for the views would be $56.25, or $71.62 for colored. If you'd rather just the American sets, that'd be 150 of 'em, twelve and a half dozen, $37.50 black and white, $47.75 colored. Let you have the whole lot for $33.75 or $42.97. Be another ten per cent off, give or take, plus the viewer free."

Jess pondered. He knew that Slim recognized his kid brother's yearning to see more of the world, and didn't entirely scorn it; but he thought that Europe was far more than Slim could ever hope to afford. There was no point in making the boy any more discontented than he already was. Slim was beginning to talk about sending him to school back East; the American views might help him to decide where he'd want to live when he was finished—though Jess, somewhat selfishly, hoped he'd figure, in the end, that Wyoming had any other place beat. "Reckon I'll just go for the Americans. Black-and-white, it'll make him want to see the real ones."

"$33.75, then."

"Sold!" said Jess at once. "I got to make a couple more stops while I'm in town—can you have 'em all picked out and boxed time I get back? Shouldn't take me an hour."

"I'll get right on it," Jock promised.

His heart light and a spring in his step, Jess quickly finished off his coffee and headed for the haberdashery, where he picked out a single-breasted silk vest, a pair of suspenders, a couple of shirts (one striped, one checked), and a pair of carpet slippers for Jonesy, and a couple of good bandannas for Andy; the owner was naturally familiar with the Sherman Ranch family and knew exactly what sizes he should buy. From there he crossed the street to stop briefly at the tobacco shop, doubled back for his horses, stuffed his purchases into the pannier that didn't have the turkeys in it, and led the animals up to the saddler's, which also sold all manner of sporting and camping goods, including dozen assortments of duck decoys in the species commonest to the area—mallards, canvasbacks, redheads, teal. Here he spent a pleasant half-hour browsing through bridles and spurs until he felt satisfied that he had just what Andy would like.

The saddlemaker tallied up his purchases, reading them out as he did on the principle that most people couldn't read upside-down. "Decoys, seven-fifty... rein chains, two-sixty; bit nine dollars; spurs sixty cents, spur straps with nickel ornaments and stamped design one-seventy... best rawhide bridle with six silver rosettes, seven-twenty... set of fourteen trout flies eight dollars... comes to $36.60 altogether, Jess."

"How much'll all that be when I add on the thirty-four I'm spendin' at Benson's? Not countin' the decoys?" asked Jess, whose arithmetic was worse than his handwriting.

"$63.10 total."

Jess grinned. "Great! Andy won't have no cause to be jealous of his big brother. Slim ain't gettin' but one present, but his costs close to that. You got a box for them birds? I don't want none of the beaks busted."

"I can get one," the man agreed.

Twenty minutes later, humming "Billy Venero" as he rode, Jess headed out Cemetery Road with his packhorse trailing behind him, so he could approach the ranch headquarters from the same direction he'd left by. Had he waited five more, he would have seen a familiar mahogany bay, with a familiar slight blanket-coated figure in the saddle, come through the belt of evergreens at the top of Front Street and head down the slope.

_**SR**_

Andy Sherman had been helping switch out stage teams since he was nine years old, and he knew exactly how long each phase of the operation took, alone and with someone to help. After he'd seen off the noon inbound, he made quick work of stabling and feeding the team, hurried inside to all but bolt his dinner, and went out again to catch up the fresh horses for the three o'clock and begin rigging them. This done, he carried in enough wood to fill both boxes, then stopped in the woodshed to gather the rabbits that hung from one of the beams. A single rabbit, for the meat and the skin, was worth almost seventeen cents, so if each of his dozen traps caught one every other day, that was over seven dollars in a week, besides his pocket-money from Slim and his tips, though the latter tended to get sparser at this season, there being less travellers in cold weather, not to speak of the fact that the coaches sometimes stopped running altogether if the snow piled up sufficiently, though that hadn't happened yet. He'd been saving ever since the middle of last month, just in case it did, and was confident that he had enough now to get presents for his big brothers—both of them—and courtesy-uncle.

Jonesy for his part had run a tally of his grocery supply to make sure he had all the ingredients he needed, then turned to baking a couple of things he didn't want Jess Harper to know about yet a while. Like Slim, he had been in a position to do very well in gift-shopping this year—not because of a reward, but because Jess's purchase of Miss Essie's piano had left him with a generous stash of savings. He had made up his mind early on that he was going to do everything in his power to make Jess's Christmas a merry and a special one, regardless of what Slim or Andy might have in mind. This was partly an effort to make up, at least a little, for the way he and Slim had treated the young Texan at the start, and partly because to Jonesy, who could see things when he came across them, it was clear that Jess, though he never said anything to suggest it, was desperate for a home, a place where he could feel safe and accepted. Slim had passed on some of the things Jess had told him out on the porch, about how there'd been times when he'd been handed his pay and asked to move on, just because the people he was working for—probably under an assumed name—had found out who and what he really was and decided they didn't want him around. Jonesy thought that was a pretty shabby way to use the youngster, or anyone else for that matter.

Slim was neighborly enough, in a reserved way, and got along pretty well with most people, but he leaned more toward the sober end of the spectrum, a natural result of his war service, of being thrust into the role of head of the household at twenty-two and sole guardian to his kid brother less than three years later, of struggling to keep what his father had built—and of the rough times right after the war, when a lot of folks thought, and sometimes said, that Matt Sherman had been a traitor; Jonesy had a suspicion that, somewhere deep inside himself, Slim hadn't yet forgiven them that. He'd go into town, do whatever errands had taken him there, maybe treat himself to noon dinner at the café, pick up a copy of the paper, stop in at the Stockmen's Palace for a beer or two, and he'd greet neighbors and townsfolk cordially when he met them, but he always gave the impression of being very focused on business, probably serious business, and no one ever implied that he should stop and listen to gossip, local or any other kind.

Jonesy was different; his outlook on life was more relaxed, perhaps because way down inside he knew that if worst ever came to worst, he could always find work, either cooking or playing piano. And he was a man who genuinely enjoyed sociability and gossip, both of which he had plenty of opportunity for, manning the kitchen for the stage passengers (many of whom talked) four times a day for the last three-plus years. He'd never told Slim so, but he knew a lot more about Jess Harper than any of the others (Jess included) thought he did. Jess was a fast gun, that was true; he had a reputation for it. But there was more to him than that—indeed any doubts Jonesy had had about him had come less from his profession than from his being a drifter, widely travelled, someone whose stories might feed into Andy's already existing restlessness. He had his code, and he'd never broken it; never lied, or cheated (except when he was cheated first), or taken an unfair advantage of anyone, man or woman. He wasn't a conscienceless killer; he always gave the other man a chance. He never killed in cold blood, never pushed a fight, just took care of business when it came up. He chose his jobs with care: he'd work security for a company, private bodyguard, range detective at two or three times the going wage, and he'd fight in a land war, but if you wanted a man to just flat out kill someone, you'd better not look Jess Harper's way. He hired himself out, but not always to the highest bidder; he'd worked for big ranchers, mineowners, stage lines, but he'd also used his gun in the service of people who really couldn't afford to pay him what he was worth. He tended to work not for the person who seemed likeliest to win or could pay the most, but the one he thought was right—and more than once his working for them had made the difference between their winning and losing. One time, it was said, in a water dispute down in New Mexico, he'd traded his services to a beleaguered combine of small ranchers for nothing but found and twenty dollars a month for cartridges. After the smoke cleared, he was asked why. He shrugged and said (according to the two different reports Jonesy had heard) "I didn't like the odds" or "They needed me. I got my pay in seein' 'em get what they was entitled to."

This kind of behavior meant that he often didn't make nearly the kind of money some gunfighters did. He'd apparently never really looked for the name; it was just that in a country where most disputes were settled with guns, he happened to be just that little bit faster and more accurate with his than most. He also didn't follow that trade consistently, as he'd told them himself his first evening at the ranch; sometimes he'd drop out and just work cattle or break horses or whatever for a while, and he was said to be—and was, from what Jonesy had observed—an all-around top hand, good at just about anything you might ask him to do. And it was rumored that even when he got the kind of pay he should have, he tended to give away large amounts of it to people he thought were deserving—something Jonesy could well believe, remembering his anonymous generosity to Chester Gannon's widow after the abortive express-office holdup this spring. Of course, being a young man and unattached, he also blew a lot of it, on gambling (though it was obvious that if he really__ wanted__ to win, with what he knew about stacking a deck, he could do it any time he was a mind to), whiskey, women, and so on; some he'd used, as any cowboy might on coming into unexpected wealth, on a good pair of boots, good horse, good saddle, good spurs, that kind of thing, not to speak of his watch and that ivory-handled Colt hidden in the chimneystack; and some he spent on lodging and good eats when he was between jobs. And there would have been times he'd had to pay to get himself doctored, or buy a new pair of jeans or some new socks, or like that, the way anybody might. But a lot of it he just slipped to people he felt needed it: small ranchers, Mexicans, squatters, sheepherders, orphaned children, sick widows, saloon girls down on their luck, drunks, prospectors in need of grubstakes, folks who'd been on the losing ends of range wars or rough winters, folks who'd been chewed out by grasshoppers or were facing foreclosure. Usually he framed his contribution as "just a loan, you can pay me back when you get on your feet"—but by the time they did he was long gone.

Jonesy marvelled that with all the characters the dime novelists had made heroes out of—some of them a lot worse in reality than Jess Harper was—none of them had ever taken it into his head to write about Jess, paint him as a Robin Hood, which in many ways he was. Maybe it was just that he wasn't showy about his charities; Jonesy hadn't learned about them all at once, he'd been picking up bits and pieces the last five years, like a hen picking up corn, and some of them he'd had to find out about by looking alongside them, the way you might turn your head to locate a distant campfire out of the side of your eye at night. First to last, Jess had probably given away a good half of what he'd earned by his gun over the years; maybe more. He'd never said so, but Jonesy had a feeling the young man didn't come from money, that he knew what it was to be in want, and didn't like to see people that way; and figuring he had nothing better to do with his earnings—like most cowboys he lived without thought of the future, probably had the notion that in his line he might not have one to worry about—he tried to ease their path when he could. The result was that it wasn't only a duplicitous riding-partner who'd been to blame for his drifting into Laramie close to stony-broke; it was that he didn't hold onto what he was paid. He also didn't think too highly of banks, and Jonesy knew, from putting away his laundry, that he kept a little hoard of bills and coins, savings from what Slim could pay him, wrapped up in a couple of socks that needed darning and tucked back into a corner of his drawer.

Andy came in again, looking diffident. "Jonesy? I got the next team all ready, they're waitin' in the barn, feedin' up for the run. You think you and the driver could put 'em on, if I took a ride into town?"

Jonesy guessed immediately what the boy's purpose was. Of course he'd have been reluctant to do his shopping on Saturdays when the men were close by, for fear they'd get a look at what he bought. "Why, I reckon we can get along all right. Andy, you want to do me a favor while you're in town?"

"Sure, Jonesy, what do you need?"

"I want you to take this three dollars," the old man said, "and get as big an assortment of penny candy as you can. And, here, here's another forty cents-see if Benson's got any pound boxes of chocolate creams." Jess was mighty fond of sweets, which Jonesy didn't find surprising. He'd already figured out that the boy likely hadn't gotten a taste of candy more than once or twice a year, back in the Panhandle when he was coming up. Plus, Jonesy had observed long ago that good-looking men not much given to alcohol often have a sweet tooth worthy of a five-year-old.

Andy looked up at him, puzzled. "I never saw you eat candy, Jonesy."

The cook looked furtively around even though he knew Jess wasn't within a mile of them. " 'T'isn't for me, it's for Jess. For Christmas."

"Oh!" the boy cried, suddenly smiling. He stood up on his toes and whispered, "That's why I'm goin' in by myself. To get Jess's present."

"Yeah?" Jonesy leaned in eagerly, curious about the boy's idea of fit gifts for a newly-settled drifter. "What'cha gonna get him?"

"They got some lined deerskin slippers at the boot store. I saw 'em in the window. You know the way Jess gripes about how cold his feet get. I'm gonna get him a pair of them."

Jonesy nodded approvingly. "That's a real good choice, Andy. I'm sure he'll be right pleased to get 'em. You know what size he wears?"

Andy grinned. " 'Member when he stepped in the mud by the pump week before last on his way to the woodshed, after we had that chinook? I measured his footprint and wrote it down. Mr. Clark can tell from that how big the slippers need to be."

"Smart," Jonesy said. "Real smart."

"And I think I'll get him a really nice bandanna, a silk one that he can wear to dances and such," Andy finished. "Are you gonna cook something special? Just for Jess, I mean?"

"Well, I been workin' on that, ever since dinnertime. I got a pan of gingerbread coolin', and some cinnamon rolls in the oven as we speak. I'll put 'em in the pie safe in the cellar—he doesn't forage in there ordinarily. And there's a kind of pie I been meanin' to try—got stewed prunes in it, and apricots, and slices of apple, and bits of canned pear, and a little dab of dandelion wine in the juice."

"Sounds like everything's in it but the kitchen sink," the boy observed.

"Good name for it. Kitchen-sink pie. Oh, yeah, and I got a dozen oranges in a net bag hid under my bed—picked 'em up when we went shoppin' last week, three and a half cents each, they were. I got a notion that boy's never tasted an orange. Those two don't pay much mind to what I get in the way of groceries, and if one of 'em asks after somethin' else I'm gettin' I can always say it's the other one's present; but if they was to see me near the candy jars they sure might get suspicious!" He winked at the boy. "All right, now, you better get movin'; remember the sun'll be settin' around half-past four, and if you're not back by then Slim's gonna go through the roof, even if it _is_ Jess you're shoppin' for."

"Do you reckon Slim's gonna give Jess a present?" Andy wondered.

"I'm sure he is. He hasn't told me just what he's decided on, apart from stocking stuffers, but I'm not blind, boy; he's been watchin' the back of Jess's head with this funny little smirk on his face, like he's real pleased with himself about somethin'."

So Andy saddled up Chaps, put his rabbits in a gunnysack and tied them on behind the cantle, made sure he had his savings securely tucked away in the buttoned pocket of his shirt, and headed for town. Mr. Schroder at the butcher shop and Mr. Benson at the general store gave him top pay for the animals and their skins, and Andy—who, of course, hadn't told Jonesy_ _everything __he planned to get—decided to make the tobacco shop his first stop. It wasn't hard to buy for Jonesy, especially if you figured on replenishing his tobacco supply at each occasion of ceremony.

"Merry Christmas, Andy," the owner greeted him. "What fetches you in?"

The boy grinned. "Same thing as this time last year, Mr. Phipps. I'm needin' some good pipe tobacco for Jonesy—that sweet plug he likes, or maybe Climax."

"Why, Andy, Jess was just in not an hour ago and got two pounds of our Best Flavored Spanish," said Phipps in surprise. "How much do you reckon Jonesy can smoke?"

"Jess was buyin' pipe tobacco? You're sure? Not Bull Durham?"

"Sure I'm sure," Phipps replied firmly. "Why, he's hardly bought a speck of Durham since back last spring, that day he was shot. And he got one of our best block meerschaum pipes, too."

_He's buyin' us presents!_ Andy realized, and thought quickly, his eyes scanning the display. "Okay," he decided, "in that case I'll get one of those buckskin tobacco pouches—he didn't buy one of them, did he?"

"No, that he didn't. That'll be forty cents."

Andy headed up-street to the saddle shop for a good mid-range gun-implement set for Jonesy to use with his shotgun, stopped at the boot shop on the way back for Jess's slippers, then went on to the dry-goods store to get the silk bandanna he'd planned for the Texan, and a ribbon tie and a pair of buckskin gloves for Slim. Since the latter two didn't come to as much as he'd spent on either of the other two men, he moved over to the section of shelving where the store's stock of books—chiefly domestic titles—was displayed. Books were always a safe present for Slim, and cost-effective besides: you could get popular or standard fiction in nice sets for as little as eighty cents per volume, poetry for ninety, and uniform sets of non-fiction for as little as two dollars. Familiar as he was with the Sherman family library, it didn't take long for him to find several new titles he thought his brother would like. After debating with himself for a while, he decided to go with quality over quantity, and chose just one: __Brady's National Photographic Collection.__

Then he stopped, as the name of Mathew Brady reminded him of the war, which in turn reminded him of Jess, whom he knew had fought in it. Andy had noticed how Jess had grinned and chuckled when he heard Charles Lamb's essays or _Alice in Wonderland_ read aloud, and how when he was home laid up after this or that he'd often paged with interest through the illustrated nonfiction texts that Andy's mother had bought for him when he was still just a little kid, "to grow into," as she said. Jess seemed to like poetry too, the swing and rhythm of it making it easy for him to remember even if he didn't always comprehend all the words—the __Lays of Ancient Rome, Idylls of the King, The Lady of the Lake, Lalla Rookh, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage,__ Aytoun's __Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers___. _Andy had derived endless pleasure from the family's books, and he wanted his new best friend to have that pleasure too. Of course Jess was free to read anything they owned, just as he could make use of anything else around the house; but Andy knew that Jess hadn't had even as much education as he had, and he'd also seen how shy Jess could be about "putting himself forward." Maybe if he had some books that were all his own he'd come to feel more at ease with them.

The trouble was that by the time Andy paid for Slim's book, he'd be close to stony-broke.

He briefly considered putting it back and taking a couple of less expensive titles instead—Bryant's new translation of the__ Iliad, __maybe, or __Cuba With Pen and Pencil,__ or Lowell's __Among My Books.__ No, that wouldn't be fair. And besides, how would he choose for Jess? There were so many books of fine poetry, or books that could make you laugh, or illustrated texts that would expand the young Texan's understanding of his world.

Then suddenly he knew what to do. With an emphatic nod of his head, he tucked the Brady book under his arm and started across the store to the main counter to pay his tab.

_**SR**_

Jess was feeling pretty smug about things on Friday morning, until Andy dropped his bombshell at breakfast. "You're gonna go with Slim and me to get the Christmas tree, aren't you, Jess?" he asked as he dribbled honey over his wheatcakes, made according to Jonesy's personal recipe with a dash of cornmeal in the batter for extra flavor.

"Christmas tree?" Jess echoed, rather inanely.

"Sure. We have to get it today, 'cause we always decorate it Christmas Eve, before company in the afternoon."

"Aw, Tiger, I don't know nothin' about pickin' out a Christmas tree," Jess protested truthfully. "There wasn't nothin' but cottonwoods and sycamores and such in the Panhandle, and only along the rivers." He'd made up his mind long ago not to tell the boy how barren his childhood Christmases had been. The eagerness with which Andy was looking forward to the day wasn't something he wanted to darken with reminiscences of that kind.

"You can't learn any younger, Jess," Slim put in from the head of the table. "And Jonesy's got all kinds of work to do here—clean up the house for company tomorrow and Christmas Day, and start in on the food, pickin' the turkey and such."

"That's right," the old man agreed. "Be a blessing to get the lot of you out of my hair and out from under my feet."

Jess nearly panicked. __What if we ain't back before Benson's man fetches the icebox? I don't know how far we'll have to go, to get wherever the trees are. There won't be an inbound stage till noon—I can't send him word to wait— __"How long is this gonna take?" he asked, keeping his voice steady with an effort. "I kinda had in mind to look over some of the harness, seein' as you said there won't be but two stages tomorrow, and none Christmas Day..."

"We'll have to go a good ways up the mountain," Slim replied, which was just what Jess had feared. "There's a big plantation of Douglas fir on the north slope—kind of hard to get to, but they make the best Christmas trees, nice shape, easy to decorate, hang onto their needles in the house, good pungent smell to them. There's a good cave up that way, too, where we can get in out of the wind and eat whatever kind of dinner Jonesy plans to put up for us. It wouldn't take so long if it wasn't for the snow, but we'd better not bank on bein' home much before three o'clock, and that's if we leave right after the first stage."

"Jonesy can't take care of two of 'em all by his own self," Jess objected, "not with his sacroiliac, and all them chores to do—"

Before Slim could reply, there was a loud "Halloo, the house!" from the yard, and Andy bounced up, chewing a mouthful of wheatcakes, to open the door. Boots tromped on the floor of the front porch, and in came Reed McCaskey's two oldest sons from the ranch next door, sixteen-year-old Joe and his brother Henry, who was thirteen. Slim got up and went to greet them as they began peeling out of their winter coats. " 'Morning, boys. You're early, we weren't expectin' you till eight or so."

"Ma chased us out," Joe explained with a grin. "Housecleanin'. Somethin' smells good—is that Jonesy's special wheatcakes?"

"It sure is. Jonesy, pour some more batter on the griddle for these boys, will you? Care for some bacon with, fellas?"

"Whatever you got'll do us fine," said Henry eagerly, and his brother cuffed him playfully over the ear.

"Hush up, you," Joe scolded, "you'll have 'em thinkin' the only reason we came over was 'cause of the grub. Oh, yeah, before I forget, Slim, Pa wanted us to be sure and tell you we'll all be by tomorrow around about one, if that's okay with Jonesy?"

"That'll be fine," the old man replied from the stove. "Long as I know how many of you there are and when to have the food ready."

Slim escorted the two gangly copper-haired youngsters over to the table. "Sit down and fill up," he invited, and to Jess: "Here's our backup. I fixed this with Reed a couple of weeks ago. Joe and Henry'll see to the stages while we get the tree. And they can check that harness, too, if you'd like—it'll keep 'em out from under Jonesy's feet in between times."

"Reckon I'll have to go along, then, since it means so much to Andy," Jess agreed. But after the first coach had been and gone, while Slim and Andy were saddling Alamo and Traveller and Chaps and rigging up a packhorse to carry, or perhaps drag, the cut tree, he made an opportunity to speak to Henry. "You like to earn a dollar?"

"Any time," the boy replied. "What do you need me to do?"

"Soon as we're out of sight," Jess explained, "ride into town and go straight to Benson's. Tell him there's been a change in plan and he can't send out the package till after four o'clock, and better not till after five, when the last inbound goes through. He'll understand."

Henry winked. "I reckon I do too. And you don't have to pay me, Mr. Harper. I'll do it free, for Christmas neighborliness."

It was a cold, crisp, clear morning, with the thermometer outside the kitchen window standing at twenty-one. Bundled in chaps and warm gloves, lined saddle coats and cozy mufflers, the trio headed up the hill behind the barn, then cut off the road to begin climbing the mountain spur. Slim led the way to break trail, with Andy close behind, and Jess and the packhorse, laden with a big sack of food, four nosebags of oats, an ax and saw and a roll of burlap, bringing up the rear. The snow was a good six inches deep, and drifted more than that in some places, but long-legged Alamo breasted it easily, only floundering a few times when he hit a depression in the ground that he couldn't see for the cover of it.

The firs, as Slim had said, grew on the north slope, looking toward the higher peaks of the main range, and sprawling out over a roughly elliptical space about four or five hundred acres in extent. Toward the edge of this area, where the ground steepened, was the cave he had spoken of, a deep pocket in the side of the mountain, its mouth some six or seven feet wide but narrowing sharply just within, then spreading out again like a half-opened sack into a cozy, sheltered room about the size of the Shermans' little second bedroom. The trees grew almost right up to it, making it hard to spot unless you knew just where to look, but at the same time breaking the force of northerly and northeasterly winds. They tethered the horses in a patch of juniper, which grew shorter and bushier than the firs and so offered better shelter, cached their grub sack under a pile of rocks in the cave, and with Slim shouldering the long crosscut saw and Jess carrying the ax, set out to find the perfect tree. To Jess they all looked more or less alike, but Andy was critical and Slim scarcely less so. Douglas firs when mature stood eighty to 120 feet high, so they concentrated on the youngsters. As Slim had said, the trees were very symmetrical in shape, with short, flexible needles, soft to the touch and ranging from yellow-green to deep green in color, and a reddish or dark-brown bark. Because conifers, except spruce, don't flourish in their parents' shade, the youngest trees tended to be toward the edges of the patch, and Jess would have sworn they circled the whole thing before Slim and Andy found one they could agree on—a healthy-looking, rather bushy specimen about as tall as the rancher himself and some four feet across at the bottom of the branch pyramid. Slim took the ax to start the cut, and when he'd made a good notch in the trunk, he and Jess set to with the saw. The cutting itself went quickly, for the trunk wasn't more than three or four inches through. __"Timber-r-r-r!"__ yelled Andy unnecessarily as it began to creak and sway, and the two men hurriedly moved out of the way. With a loud ripping sound the trunk gave way, and the tree slammed to earth, throwing up a glittering cloud of powdery snow.

"We'll leave it here, and bring the horses to it when we're ready to go back," said Slim. "Let's get somethin' to eat, this kind of weather always makes me hungry."

They hiked back to the cave, where Jess made a fire for coffee and Slim and Andy unpacked the food. There was sage-flavored sausage to roast on whittled sticks, potatoes to bake in the ashes, a little crock of beans to reheat, canned tomatoes with a wedge of good rat cheese to melt into them, raisin-cakes like oversized cupcakes, and canned pears, and not coffee but cocoa, sweet and delicious, to make up in the pot. They ate well while the horses munched from their nosebags, then rested for a while, letting their food settle and talking a little, until the sun showed it was about half-past one. "Better get goin'," Slim decided, "or we won't beat the dark."

They saddled up and returned to where the tree lay, and Slim spread the burlap out on the snow and carefully rolled the little fir onto it, then wrapped it up and tied it securely with twine before he and Jess hoisted it onto the packhorse's back while Andy held the animal's halter shank. They roped it firmly in place and mounted up for the journey home, which took considerably less time, since they were going downhill and could follow their own trail of the morning. They pulled into the yard about half-past three, and Jess volunteered to take care of the horses while Slim and Andy got the tree settled in the angle of the side-yard fence in a washtub full of sand previously prepared for the purpose. Joe and Henry had stayed on just in case they were late getting back, and this task gave Jess a chance to take Henry aside and get confirmation that Benson's man would be out at just about six. Then the two McCaskey boys headed home to get their suppers while Slim climbed up into the low-pitched garret above the back half of the house to look for the box of Christmas ornaments, and Andy and Jess took charge of the last stage of the day at five.

Once inside again, Jess kept an eye on the mantel clock, and a little before six he made a rather obvious search of his pockets and said disgustedly, "Shoot! Can't find my pocketknife. Wonder if I dropped it in the barn?"

"You're not goin' out to look for it at this hour, are you?" Slim asked in surprise.

"I better had, or there's no knowin' where it'll end up—raked up with the litter, maybe," Jess replied. "Supper ain't till seven, is it, Jonesy?"

"That's about right. You want Andy to help you? He's done peelin' the potatoes, I can spare him—"

"No, that's okay. Two pairs of feet might scuff it into a corner; one's better. I'll be as quick as I can."

Darkness had fallen, and Jess had to take a lantern to find his way across the yard. He paused just outside the barn doors, eyeing the sky and sniffing the air, remembering how it had smelled before the first snow in November and the occasionally gingerly way Jonesy was moving, as if his sacroiliac was sending out signals. For that matter, the healed break in Jess's left leg was making him wince a bit. _Gonna snow again, like as not,_ he thought, and slipped in by the front doors—and immediately out the back. He only had to wait ten minutes before the hissing swish of sleigh runners in the snow announced Benson's man bringing his wagon over the old trail from Cemetery Road. He'd paused to remove the bells from his team's harness after he turned off, so they wouldn't give warning of his coming. Jess was prepared for him with the little sledge they used to move sacks from the feed shed to the barn. He leaned a sturdy plank against the back edge of the wagon bed, and between them they got the icebox down it, onto the sledge and into the barn, where they tucked it into the extra stall that was used to store tools, liniments, and the like. Jess saw the man off, a dollar richer for his trouble, and went back to dump hay over it before crossing the yard to re-enter the house, triumphantly holding up the knife that had never left his pocket.

After supper they made up another pot of cocoa and popped corn to make garlands for the tree, though a good share of it went down their gullets, and Jonesy strung cranberries. "You meanin' to go to them doin's in town tomorrow night, Slim?" Jess asked.

"I don't know," the rancher admitted. "It mostly tends to be townsfolk, and people who live nearer in. If it starts to snow... what do _you _think, Jonesy?"

"Well, I wouldn't count on makin' it," the old man replied. "We might get stuck."

"I'm thinkin' the same," said Jess, kneading his leg, which was aching worse than before, having perhaps been aggravated by the labor of moving the icebox.

Slim nodded. "We can only make it about one year out of four," he admitted. "Last time was '67, just before Ma died. It's a nice party, gifts for all the kids, a dance and supper, but we can't chance bein' stranded in town. The stages won't run if the snow's really deep, but the stock and the chickens still have to be fed, not to mention Andy's pets." He looked to his brother. "I'm sorry, Andy, I know you were hopin' to go..."

"It's okay, Slim," the boy assured him. "It's not like I'm still a little kid. I know it's not __really__ Santa Claus. And we don't have to go to the singin'; we can do our own now that Jonesy has his piano."

Slim smiled and tousled his hair. "Thanks for understanding, Andy. Jonesy, I'll ride over to Hardimans' first thing in the morning to pick up the ham, so I can get back before the company starts showin' up."

"That's the third time you-all've spoke of company," Jess observed. "Who're you expectin', kinfolk?"

"No, all of ours live too far off to make it," Slim told him. "Aunt Ella's about the closest, and she's got seven grown-up youngsters startin' families of their own, so she'll have a houseful to look after. No, it'll just be neighbors—McCaskeys, Bateses, Millers. We hold kind of an open house."

Jess tried not to sigh audibly in relief. He'd already met Slim's Aunt Ella, and they hadn't hit it off; he'd been feeling a bit dubious about trying to make a good impression on any other Shermans (even though Ella was only one by marriage), especially considering how he and Slim had started out, months ago.

Slim for his part, as he always did at this time of year, was feeling keenly the absence of his parents, and wishing, not for the first time, that they could have known Jess. Knowing as he did how strongly Jonesy and especially Andy had taken to the young Texan, he felt sure they would have welcomed and loved him just as much. Mary Sherman would have fussed over him as she had over Andy and Slim, mending his clothes, nursing him when he was ill or injured, trying to feed him up and "put some meat on those bones;" Slim could picture her cupping Jess's lean face in her hands, stroking his hair, offering her advice when he was troubled, giving him comfort and the mother-love he so desperately needed. As for Matt—Matt would have seen that Slim and Andy each considered Jess another brother, and he would have accepted him as a son. He'd have appreciated Jess's cow savvy and hard work, his deep if inarticulate love for the land, and above all his gift with horses. He'd have stood behind both "his boys" however they needed it, with bail money, or quiet support, or a gun. __I'm hopin' this Christmas will be enough to make him understand, __Slim thought to the absent couple, __to see that this is his home and we're his family, if only he'll accept what we have to give him. I could use a little help with that, if you can spare a bit of your eternity for it. Sometimes I think divine intervention's about the only thing that'll settle him in place and make him quit ridin' off on the least little excuse... that thing with the Hamry kid was too doggone close.__

"You found the Christmas ornaments, didn't you, Slim?" Andy asked suddenly.

"Didn't I say so? Yeah, they were right where I thought I'd put 'em. I left 'em under the cover of my desk. You can get 'em out to show to Jess, if you want to."

The boy needed no further urging; he was up in a blink and lifting the tambour top to reveal a small orange crate which, when the lid was raised, proved to contain an array of glass ornaments, opaque and transparent, in multitudinous colors (often with applied spots or bands of glitter) and a variety of shapes—round, elliptical, elongated, bell, even oblong—and all cushioned with cotton batting and a layer of straw. Jess had seen Christmas trees, both family and community, in his wanderings, but they'd all been decorated with homemade items, even in the wealthiest households. "Ain't never seen nothin' like these," he confessed, gingerly extending a forefinger to touch the nearest.

"German," Slim told him. "There's a story behind 'em. In Illinois, where I was born, we had a lot of German families, farmers and craftsmen and even a couple of professional men, and of course German merchants settled in Carthage to supply their needs. The man who kept our general store was one of those. I've heard there are plenty of Germans in Texas too, so maybe you know that to them, Christianity without Christmas and family life without Yuletide would be just unthinkable. They make a big deal of singin' and gift‑givin'; their kids get presents twice—once on St. Nicholas Day, Andy's birthday, when they find sweets, apples, and nuts in their stockings, and again on Christmas Eve, when the Christ Child comes to leave presents stacked in individual heaps on little tables around the tree. It's said the Germans were the first people to decorate trees for Christmas—some say Martin Luther did the earliest one—and that the Hessians and the Pennsylvania Dutch introduced the custom in this country; I've read that already almost fifty years ago in Philadelphia, the season wasn't complete without a walk around the town to look at the elaborately trimmed ones in the front windows of the houses.

"Anyway, those German settlers back in Hancock County brought their culture with 'em, music and instruments, books, china, handicrafts, food, beer and wine—and ornaments. And Herr Konrad, our storekeeper, always ordered more for the season, in case some had gotten broken, or some new household had been established during the year and needed to start from scratch. They'd come over from the Old Country, through the port of New Orleans, and up the river to St. Louis, where there's a big German colony. Folks saw the good times the Germans had, and started pickin' up that way of observin' the day; by the time I was five or six the only people who didn't were the hardest-shelled Baptists and Presbyterians. Pa always thought that if Jesus was born to save us, it made sense to celebrate His birth with all the joy and beauty and laughter you could, so he bought some of these every year. They weren't cheap—the lowest priced box of a dozen ran forty-five cents, and the ones in fancy shapes could go a dime each—but he thought they were worth it. And when we moved out here, neither he nor Ma would think of not bringin' 'em along."

"I reckon I best leave puttin' 'em up to you fellers," said Jess. "I'd be scared I'd drop one."

"Aw, no, Jess, please, you have to help," Andy insisted. "Why, look at the way you can whittle. You're not clumsy."

"Whittlin' ain't the same, Tiger. Wood don't break," Jess reminded him. "These here is family heirlooms, passed down from your folks. It wouldn't be fitten for me to handle 'em."

Andy directed a pleading look at his brother, but Slim shook his head. "Don't push, Andy. If Jess doesn't feel right about helpin' with the tree, he can tack up greenery. There's a load of it in the woodshed, you just tell him where we usually put it."_ _Maybe he'll feel different, after he gets his present,__ he thought.

He hoped so, because if Jess didn't cheer up a bit and get into the spirit of the season, he was likely to put a damper on the whole holiday.

**SR**

After breakfast the next morning Slim saddled Alamo and headed out to the Hardiman homestead, where dwelt Malcolm Hardiman, his wife Eva Rose, and their four sons, George, Edgar, Lewis, and Rufus, aged about fourteen or fifteen down to nine. Hardiman turned out the best hams in the county—nobody knew whether it was the breed of his pigs, the food they got, the way he cured the meat, or some combination—and the Shermans had been trading him for their supply ever since his first winter in Wyoming.

When he came back, before he went in, he took a side trip up to the pasture, found the __remuda,__ and managed with some difficulty to get the black filly away from it. Checking carefully to make sure Jess wasn't in sight, he chivvied her across the road and behind the barn, after which it was easy enough to get her inside. Then he put Alamo up and took the ham in to Jonesy, and he and Jess carried the Christmas tree into the house, setting it up between the fireplace and the kitchen archway. Slim and Andy decorated it while Jess nailed festoons of evergreen ropes over the windows and doorways, adorned the chimneypiece with mistletoe and with barberry and Indian arrowwood (holly being unfindable in the Rockies), hung a wreath of the latter two, with their shining berries, on the front door and sprigs on the picture frames and in the windows. Besides the delicate German ornaments and the popcorn and cranberry chains, there were gilded nuts, red paper bells, ropes of glittering beads, knots and tiny flags of bright ribbon, stars and shields of colored paper, candy apples, and gingerbread and cookie figures, all topped off with a plaster-of-Paris angel with robes and wings painted white. Jess found himself pondering the possibility of making some little whittled figures to add to the display—animals (the animals had been the first creatures to see the baby Jesus, hadn't they?) and angels and shepherds, drums and bells; not this year, but maybe for next. From the kitchen came much clashing of pans and crockery and delicious smells that filled the entire house.

Around half past twelve the first of the guests drove into the yard behind teams jingling with bells: Bill Bates with his wife and the four grandkids they were raising, the four Miller boys with their three sisters and ten-year-old orphaned niece, and of course, last of all, Reed and Lillian McCaskey with their five sons, four daughters, three sons-in-law, and several young grandchildren. There were gifts, primarily of food: Helen Bates and her granddaughters, Jane, sixteen, and Anne, twelve, and Rachel Miller, who was about Jane's age, had assembled generous baskets of put-ups—homemade grape-juice and cottage cheese, a yellow jam of groundcherries flavored with lemon-peel, cranberry jelly in little molds like bunches of grapes, apricot marmalade with a few peach pits in it, batches of apple butter and rhubarb marmalade made to Mary Sherman's old recipes, tomato preserves, pickles, crumbly homemade herb cheeses with tansy and sage; Lillian McCaskey had brought a coconut cake, a jelly cake, and an assortment of cookies—sugar, almond, chocolate-filled—in star and diamond shapes. Jonesy reciprocated with Mason jars full of the venison mincemeat he'd put down after the first fat bucks of the fall were brought in—he had a huge keg of it stored away in the cellar—and puddings made with currants and stoned dried cherries and accompanied by jars of custard sauce to top them with, as well as sauerkraut, red-brown chili sauce with lots of onion, mustard beans (which were green or yellow string-beans flavored with mustard), and homemade horseradish of grated roots mixed with vinegar. Lillian also had a pair of mittens and a muffler which she had knitted for each of Sherman Ranch's inhabitants: green for Slim, blue for Jess, purple for Jonesy, and deep red for Andy.

Jonesy had been cooking non-stop since he got up that morning, and had a good spread of food laid out on the big table: cold sliced beef, a cold stuffed duck with applesauce on the side, cold roast chicken, hash-brown potatoes with gravy, fried onion rings, stewed beans with a little salt pork added for flavor, canned tomatoes baked with dumplings, cabbage salad with sour-cream dressing, golden-hued biscuits with assorted jellies and preserves traded from the homesteaders' wives, apple pie and cherry pie and a steaming canned-peach cobbler with a crust of crumbs, butter, and brown sugar, and thick cream to pour over it if desired. All the household cats wore bright red bows tied around their necks, and Jojo had some miniature sleigh bells on his collar that jingled cheerfully as he pattered around the place, excited by the company and the good smells of the food. The day's single inbound stage briefly interrupted the party about three, but the male guests took over the responsibility for seeing it tended to while Jonesy and the Shermans welcomed three chilled and eager-to-get-home late holiday travellers in for hot coffee and a peck at the buffet. There was so much food that even after the coach had gone on and the family and its guests had finished pulling taffy and singing around the piano and playing charades and forfeits and Going-to-Jerusalem (which some folks called musical chairs), and the company had driven off in a chiming of sleigh bells, enough remained left over for the ranch family to make a good pick-up supper off of, once the barn chores were done.

Jess had politely begged off most of the games, whether from shyness or embarrassment Slim wasn't sure, but the rancher had resisted the temptation to put any pressure on. __He's still new here, still feels a little like a stranger,__ he told himself, __and likely isn't altogether sure he's fully welcome; he's easy enough with us, but he doesn't see the other families that often, hasn't had a chance to get comfortable with them. At least he sang with us, wherever he knew the words, and that has to be a good sign; he wasn't deliberately trying to be a wet blanket. I know what he was; I shouldn't expect him to lose all his old ways this soon. That he's come as far as he has is miracle enough.__

Slim and Andy went out to take care of the barn work, leaving Jess to help Jonesy clean up. He didn't protest too much—the old broken bone was aching continuously now. He wasn't at all surprised when the brothers came in brushing fresh snow off their shoulders and shaking it off their hats. "It started while we were in the barn," Slim said, stamping his feet to get it off his boots. "It's comin' down really thick—you can't see much more than just the lighted windows from across the yard. But it's not blowin' too hard, so it's probably not makin' up for a blizzard."

They all pitched in to wash and dry the last of the dishes and get them put away, and then Slim lit the candles on the tree and the Yule log on the hearth, he and Andy and Jonesy hung up their stockings, and they all toasted apples over the fire, and stale bread which they ate with melted cheese. Eventually came the moment Slim had been expecting. "Slim," Andy requested, "tell about what Christmas was like when you were my age."

"You've heard that story at least half a dozen times, Andy," Slim reminded him. __Just not from me, __he thought. __Ma told it to him... after she was gone, I never had the heart for it.__

"That's why I want to hear it again," the boy replied. "This is Christmastime. It's a season for traditions—isn't it?"

"Boy's got a point, Slim," drawled Jonesy.

"And besides," Andy added, "Jess has never heard it. And he should."

Slim glanced at the wiry young Texan sitting quietly in the rocker that had come to be acknowledged as "his," so unpredictable and hard to understand, yet so loyal and generous, so brave and trustworthy, who had ridden into his life little more than seven months ago and become, somehow, so much a part of it—almost as if he'd always been there. Jess didn't say anything, but there was a tilt to his head and a spark in his eye that Slim had come to know. He wanted to hear this story, to be included in as many of the household traditions as they'd let him—as long as he wasn't expected to do anything he considered above his station, like helping trim the tree. Maybe he couldn't express why he wanted it, maybe he didn't even know why he wanted it, but that didn't matter. He had earned the right to hear it—through hard work and shed blood and Andy's love.

And Andy, who had no close family left except his brother, had by that very fact earned the right to expect that his brother would share family history and traditions with him.

Slim settled back in his chair and began. "When I was your age, Andy, Ma and Pa and I lived in Hancock County, in the Quincy Hills country, where the Mississippi makes a big bulge west. Pa had bought land there in '32, when he was in the Santa Fe trade; it had been a good year for him, he'd made a profit of $3400 on a $340 investment, and he decided to settle in those parts because several of his brothers and cousins already had. Most were in livestock, the same as Pa—Uncle Jim, the oldest, who wasn't married yet, didn't take a wife till he was forty-three; Uncle Pete, a blacksmith, who was thirty-four and had only married three years earlier—he and Aunt Abigail lived together happily for nearly thirty-nine years all told, and had nine children: six survived, two died in infancy, and one, a daughter, at seventeen; Uncle Mark, who was Pa's twin, twenty-eight then, a year married; Uncle Jude, who was twenty, and Uncle Ben, who was eighteen, Pa's favorite of the lot—they lived with Uncle Mark and helped out on his place. Uncle Luke had stayed on in Ohio when the rest moved west, and Uncle Jack was in and out, mostly out—he had the itchiest foot in the family."

"What became of our uncles?" Andy asked, though of course he knew the answer.

"Well," Slim replied, more for Jess's benefit than for his brother's, "Uncle Jim, as I said, was forty-three when he married; Aunt Ella was twenty-five, a widow with a young son. They had fourteen children over some twenty-five years' time—six daughters and eight sons. Four died in infancy, leavin' ten, and there are four at home now: Kate, Liza, and Diane, who are almost thirteen, eight, and five, and Cole, who's seven. They had two sets of twins—nobody was surprised that there'd be one, after all Uncle Jim's folks had done that, but two was a bit more than anyone expected. Jason and Jarrod were the oldest of the lot, they're thirty-two now, and after eight years and three more sons, one of whom died when he was three weeks old, they had the girls, Rachel and Regina. Then there was Dan and Stuart in between, and their half-brother, Stephen Rowley. They all came west a couple of years after we did, and settled near Fort Lupton. Uncle Mark and Aunt Susannah had five children, but only one boy and girl lived beyond infancy. Then, after not quite eight years, Aunt Susannah died after bearin' a stillborn daughter. Nathan was six, Sarah a year old, and Uncle Mark was thirty-five. His land was right next to Uncle Jim's, so he took the kids to live with Jim and Ella's family, and they shared the work. Seven years later he took a second wife and moved back to his own house, and her younger brother eventually became his daughter's husband. They still live in Illinois—they're the only ones out of the lot who do.

"Uncle Jude died the year before we moved out here, at forty-five, survived by his wife and four children, all of 'em under seven—he was another one who took his time choosin' a woman—and she sold his land and moved down to Missouri, where her parents lived, and started a dairy. Uncle Pete took his family to California during the Gold Rush and settled in San Diego, started a livery business to go with his smithery, then added on a feed-and-grain store later; his family's still running his businesses, doin' well. Uncle Ben moved South when he was twenty, lookin' for better opportunities, and got to be a player in the steamboat business out of New Orleans. We lost contact for a while durin' the war, but I finally heard from them again in '67; his oldest boy had been killed at Gettysburg, and his daughter and her husband moved to New Mexico afterward to get away from Reconstruction—they're livin' down in Lincoln County now, John Chisum's a neighbor of theirs; they've got two boys, ten and five, and a girl of eight." A pause, then: "After Ma and Pa met and got married, which was ten years after Pa bought the land, two of Ma's brothers and one of her sisters followed them to Hancock County with their families. Aunt Laura's husband went into livestock buyin', and she raised four sons and buried three daughters. Her brothers started up a law practice in Carthage; Uncle Edward had eight sons and three daughters, and Uncle Richard had four and two. We only lived six miles or so out of town, so within a circle about a dozen miles across I eventually had forty-four first cousins. And just over the line in McDonough County was my grandpa's brother, my Great-Uncle Clifford, and his family—seven sons, one daughter, and eventually, by the time Pa brought us out here, twenty-five grandchildren and six great-grandchildren."

Jess had been listening to this enumeration of kinfolk with a queer sensation of half envy, half sadness. He knew from things his pa had said that Sam Harper's generation had numbered well over a hundred men and women of an age for his children to have called "uncle" and "aunt," yet Jess had never met any of them, or the cousins they must have given him. He wasn't sure whether this was a good thing or a bad one, given the reputation of the East Texas Harpers as he understood it, yet knowing that Slim had grown up knowing so many of his kin—and from both sides—made him feel a little bitter. But what he said was: "How do y'all keep track of each other?"

"It's not hard," said Slim. "First day of each month, Aunt Ella takes a sheet or two of paper, fills 'em with news from her family, and mails 'em on to Aunt Abigail, Uncle Pete's widow, out in California. She and her family add their news and pass both letters on to Aunt Phoebe, Uncle Jude's widow. She sends 'em to Uncle Mark, along with her own, and so on. Eventually the package, much fatter, makes its way back to Aunt Ella, and meanwhile about once a month each household can catch up on everything that's been written about by all the relations—vacation trips, business affairs, marital misunderstandings, child‑raising, meetings with notables, household management, and head colds. Ma's family—there were eleven of 'em altogether, countin' herself; some of the oldest are dead now, and their children are writin' the letters—do the same thing. About every two weeks, I guess, we get a packet from one side or the other."

Jess pondered this for a moment, then asked in a diffident manner, "You tell 'em about me?"

"Of course I did," Slim replied, in a tone that suggested he was very surprised that Jess would have doubted it. "Why wouldn't I? You're part of this ranch, aren't you?"

"So you keep tellin' me," Jess murmured.

Slim shot him a peculiar look, but before he could make anything of the remark, Andy said, "You must've done a lot of visitin' around, if you all lived so close together."

"We did," Slim agreed. "Pa was usually gone from about late February or some time in March into late October or early November, drivin' cattle, freightin', tradin' with the Indians along the Front Ranges, and two whole years fightin' in the war with Mexico when I was only three or four. But in the winter, when he was home and the packed snow on the roads made the travellin' easy, we used to drive around all over the county in our sleigh. And even when he was gone, Ma would go to dinner at one house of kinfolk or another just about every Sunday, takin' me along in her buggy. When I was small, especially, that was a big treat, since I didn't have any brothers or sisters at home; it gave me somebody to play with for longer than just a schoolday recess. I guess the cousin I was closest to was Stuart, Uncle Jim's fifth son; we were only about six months apart in age."

"If you had nobody at home to play with," said Andy, "what did you do?"

"About the same as you, actually," his brother replied with a grin. "I went to school when it kept, which was maybe four months out of the year, because in farmin' country everybody over the age of eight or so is needed in the fields or around the garden from first plowin' to harvest; even though Pa didn't farm much, and we had a hired man to do most of it, the school tended to peter out around the beginning of April, with only a few of the smallest kids still showin' up, and our teacher, Miss Rachel Coates, quietly closed the term out. Beginning about October and goin' on through June, there'd be travellin' theatrical companies and other entertainers, and every one of 'em managed to light in Carthage for at least a night or two, it being the county seat and almost smack in the middle of the county to boot; we usually went to see some of 'em, besides the shows that the local amateur actin' club put on at the town hall, and the circus every year. The rest of the time, I had chores, books, fishin', swimmin', explorin', solitary kinds of play like diavolo and tops and ice-skatin', pets... once I raised an orphaned beef calf, brought him up on a bottle; he lived and thrived and grew up to be one of the best bulls we ever had, even won a prize at the county fair when he was only three years old. Another time I found a female fox killed in a trap. I could see she'd been nursin', so I backtracked her to her den and found one pup still alive, his eyes not even open yet. I took him home and put him to nurse with one of our cats, who'd just had kittens. She adopted him right off, and he grew up thinkin' he was a bushy-tailed cat; you'd see him runnin' around the barnyard, leapin' up in the air the way foxes do, playin' with his foster brothers and sisters and their kittens after them. Never once troubled the poultry, since his foster-mother had never taught him to do that, but he was a demon mouser, and as for rats, as long as he was with us we never saw one alive around our buildings.

"I had a dog, too, a Bernese mountain dog—if you've never seen one, Jess, they're beautiful big dogs, average around twenty-five inches at the shoulder, close to ninety pounds full grown, long curved tail that's kind of bushy but mostly hangs down near the hocks, folded-over ears, a thick black coat with white chest and face blazes, feet, and tail-tip, and tan patches over the eyes and just up from the paws. They're an old breed, first brought into Switzerland by the Romans, back before the time of Christ. They don't do well in hot countries, so you probably don't have 'em in Texas. They're loyal, tireless, great herders and guard dogs, and they take to training, though they tend to be impetuous, often unruly, and if ever there was a one-man dog, a Bernese is it. Pa liked to keep at least a pair of 'em around the place, because of the cattle; he'd clear a good hundred dollars a year sellin' the pups, they were almost as much in demand as good hunting hounds. This one latched onto me when he was just startin' to stagger around, and he was my dog from that day on. I called him Baron Von Bite-Offen, Baron for short. About the same time I had a pet goat, a black-and-white one who was almost the same size as Baron—if you saw the two of 'em from a distance you might've thought they were both dogs. His name was Dancer and they were just inseparable, they'd play together. They used to go out to the pasture with me and do it while I herded the cattle. I didn't mind; I knew if I ever needed Baron to help me all I'd have to do was whistle."

"How 'bout that," Jess commented softly.

"Yeah," said Slim with a soft remembering smile, "they were about my best friends, those two. Around the hot part of the afternoon when the cattle liked to lie down and chew their cuds, I'd hole up in the shade of the trees along the boundary line and they'd come with me, and I'd eat the dinner Ma had packed for me while they lay alongside me, and then I'd read or take a nap, usin' Dancer's side for a pillow. When the cattle started gettin'up to feed again, Baron would give me a nudge with his nose, and if I didn't wake up the lightest nip on the ear, and I'd know I had to get back in the saddle."

"What was Christmas like for you, Slim?" Andy asked.

"Oh, we made a big deal of it, just like the Germans, even though we didn't share any of their blood and there were only the three of us most of the time, plus Mrs. Browning, who was our hired girl, and the farmhand. Ma always made the Christmas pudding on 'Stir-Up Sunday,' the last Sunday before Advent: each of us would take a turn at stirrin' it—when I was little Ma would do it for me—and make a wish while we did it. The next Sunday we'd hang an evergreen Advent wreath over the dining-room table, with a single red candle in it; Advent's an Anglican custom, but Ma had been raised in that church and she'd held onto it. Every day she'd add a white or gold paper star with a Bible verse to the wreath and the candle would be lit, and each Sunday another candle was put in it and lit while we read verses and sang carols and enjoyed special treats. Pa would cut a cedar for our Christmas tree down near the river—just like you Texans, Jess, we didn't have pines or firs. He'd bring it in and we'll all turn to decoratin' it with popcorn and cranberry garlands, gay-colored ribbons, paper chains and flowers, and pieces of tin cut into star-shapes, some left plain and some painted red or blue—that was one of my jobs, to paint 'em—and the German ornaments when we started gettin' those. Ma always made popcorn balls and gingersnaps and molasses taffy. There were turkey shoots all over the county, two dollars for five chances, and we could count on Pa to win at least one of 'em, which was a bargain, since a big fat turkey could go for twenty; if he did better, he'd donate the extra birds to the church, for folks who were down on their luck.

"I told you about Herr Konrad, our storekeeper, but Carthage had a German butcher and baker too. All through December, whenever we were in town to shop, Pa would get some hot fresh pretzels at Eisenberg's and we'd eat 'em for a treat, and Ma always bought a Dresden__stollen,__ which is a cake that Germans like to exchange at Christmastime—a sweet dough filled with almonds, raisins, currants, and delicious glazed fruits, and dusted thick with sifted confectioner's sugar. We'd have that for our Christmas-Eve supper, and I can tell you we never left a crumb.

"Soon after the Mexican War ended, Protestant preachers started bringin' Christmas trees into the church as the cornerstone of the Sunday-school exercises on Christmas Eve, though at first any but a German congregation was likely to be outraged at the 'paganism' of it. But it took hold in short order, and ours was no exception. We'd have a pageant, with a song by the whole Sunday school, an invocation by the minister, and enough recitations, dialogues, and songs so each kid would get a chance to perform—a lot like the way they do it in Laramie. Then each of the kids would get a net stocking crammed with nuts and oranges and bright-colored candies, and little gifts like whistles, jackknives, warm stockings and mittens, woollen scarves, knitted garters and wristbands, hair ribbons, and pocket combs. There were always dolls and curious packages waitin' in a pile to be given out; every family kicked in fifty cents to make a fund to pay for the presents, and the storekeepers who went to that church would usually donate things too. After that the grownups' choir would give a song service, with solos and duets and choruses, and the congregation would join in on the hymns and anthems. We were Presbyterians, or at least Ma was, but the preacher we had when I was a boy was a Congregationalist—the two churches are so close in doctrine that people cross back and forth without a thought; a liberal, unorthodox kind of preacher who used to say he'd spent the better part of twelve years moppin' up damage from his predecessor's sermons, because, he claimed, it wasn't the wicked people who were changed by 'em, nor the pious and prim who were well set in their ways and not about to change; it was the meek and easily frightened, those who had a fragile hold on the everlastin' mercy. He was the one who brought in the organ and the Christmas service—changed the whole look of the place, you might say; it was a few years before I was born that the last of the old-time hard-liners who'd dominated the congregation up to then died off or moved away, and the new comers-up decided to call a new man who wouldn't talk so much about hellfire.

"After the service we'd head home in the sleigh, with the stars glitterin' like diamonds in the dark sky overhead, and Pa sometimes gettin' into a race with some other family, standin' up at the front of the sleigh and crackin' his whip in big circlin' sweeps—I used to think that was what the old-time Roman charioteers must have looked like. By the time we'd get back to the house I'd usually be more than half asleep, and Pa would carry me up to the loft where my bed was and tuck me in under my buffalo robe, and the next thing I'd know I'd hear the roosters hollerin' and it would be Christmas morning. We'd have our presents and a big breakfast, then drive to the church again for a midmorning service, and from there to whichever relative was throwin' Christmas dinner that year. There'd be a roast, or more often two or three of 'em—goose, beef, duck, pork, chicken, game, turkey—plus ham, cranberry sauce, potatoes, coleslaw, squash, beets, carrots, all kinds of put-ups, and last of all pies and cakes and a plum pudding doused with warm rum or brandy and set afire. If we were at Aunt Laura's or one of her brothers' houses, there were always small silver coins scattered through it—three-cent, five-cent, dimes and half-dimes and one-bits, sometimes a couple of quarters and a fifty-cent piece—and if you bit down on one you got to keep it, so you can bet we all took small spoonfuls. After the meal the host family's kids would put on a Christmas play, like a dramatic reading of 'The Night Before Christmas,' and then everybody would pull taffy and play charades, blind man's buff, bag-and-stick, hunt-the-slipper, just about anything anybody asked for. As it got dark the candles on the tree would be lit, and we'd all gather around and tell stories—true ones, legends, fairy tales. All that week right through New Year's there'd be a dinner at a different house for us to go to."

"Did you have a stocking?" Andy wanted to know.

"Oh, we all did, just like now. Even Pa would hang one up, and Ma and I would fill it with small presents, just like Andy Jackson's family did his. And there were always big gifts too. The ones from Pa were the best I got, or it seemed that way; almost always they'd be somethin' he'd picked up on his travels. The Christmas just before I turned eight it was a pony, so I could herd the cattle more safely. The next year he brought a lariat from Texas, and a little toy sword with a scabbard and a belt that he'd bought in St. Louis; all that next season I used to spend half my time tryin' to rope the little calves, and half of it pretendin' I was a cavalry officer leadin' a charge against the Mexicans at Palo Alto or Monterrey, or against Comanche or Navajo raiders. And the year after that it was a pair of Pawnee moccasins with fine beadwork, to put on in the house after evening chores, and a bow and arrows in a case and quiver—real weapons that had killed buffalo and been used in battles between the tribes. I think they may still be in one of the trunks in the attic—remind me after Christmas and I'll see if I can find 'em."

Andy's big black-brown eyes were alight with pleasure and excitement at the pictures his brother's descriptions made in his mind and the prospect of seeing the treasures. He took a breath to ask Jess for his version of the holiday, but shrewd old Jonesy, sucking on his pipe near the wall of the fireplace, saw the quick spark of panic come up in the Texan's eyes as he noted the direction of the boy's gaze, and put in in a casual drawl, "Wa-a-al now, I recollect when I was a sprout, comin' up in Indiana fifty years ago..."

By the time he'd finished his reminsicing, the mantel clock showed twenty after ten. "Guess we better turn in," said Slim, getting to his feet for a stretch. "Past your bedtime, Andy. We won't have stages tomorrow, just chores, but Jonesy's got to be rested up to cook the feast."

"You go 'head," said Jess. "I'm gonna sit up a little spell yet—leg's hurtin' some."

"Want some tea for it, boy?" Jonesy asked. "I got a couple of things good for pain—"

"No, I'll be okay, thanks just the same," Jess told him. "I'm used to it. I'll just sit here and rock and kinda put myself half to sleep."

"Will you cover the fire before you come to bed?" Slim asked him.

"Sure thing," Jess promised. " 'Night, Tiger."

" 'Night, Jess. Merry Christmas." The boy leaned over to give him a quick hard hug.

"Yeah, Merry Christmas," said Jess, and watched with inscrutable eyes as Andy shuffled off toward the bunkroom.

"I'll help you close up the kitchen, Jonesy," Slim offered, and the two of them went through the arch, where Slim knelt to open the firebox door on the stove and begin banking the fire while Jonesy refilled the reservoir from the barrel of water in the storeroom. Under cover of the clanking and rattling and splashing, he said quietly, "That's one thing we didn't think about, wasn't it? We got him his presents, even the little stuff for his stocking, but we didn't stop to realize he might not have one to hang up. What are we gonna do about it?"

"I got an extra one we can put up for him," Jonesy replied. "If he runs true to form, he won't be up and around till at least half an hour after you—that'll give us plenty of time to fill it." He snorted. "Likely won't even notice it till he's had his coffee, anyhow."

Slim grinned and slapped his old friend's shoulder gently. "Thanks, Jonesy, you're a lifesaver as always. I should'a' figured you'd have contingency plans in place."

Jonesy just winked. "I've grown right fond of him too, you know." Then he said, "That felt good, didn't it?"

"What do you mean?" Slim asked.

"Tellin' Andy all those things about when you were a kid. Talkin' about Matt and Mary again. You haven't done much of that, these last few years."

The younger man sighed. "I know. I regret it now. I must have made myself seem a lot less human to him—I know he was grievin' too, but it just hurt so much to think about them... especially Pa. I hate it that we never got the chance to make everything up, after the war..." He trailed off and was silent a moment, then said thoughtfully, "You know, I think this is the first Christmas since we lost Ma that I haven't felt I had to force myself to get into the holiday spirit. It's funny the difference one little change can make. Since Jess came... the place feels more like a home, somehow, and we seem to've all gotten tighter. And the good it's done for Andy... if you'd told me a year ago how he'd be today, I'd have said you'd been nippin' on that medicinal bottle of yours. We owe him, Jonesy, big time. I'm hopin' tomorrow will go some way toward settlin' that debt."

They finished up their tasks, and then Jonesy went off to bed, and Slim snuffed out the candles on the tree and followed him. Jess sat quietly in his rocker for half an hour or so, listening to the little creaks and bangs of the cooling stove and the settling house, then stood and put one knee up on the leather couch under the front window. With all but one of the lamps turned out and that one as low as it could go short of darkness, he could see the snow falling, a thick, soft, steady tumble of flakes, occasionally stirred by a momentary breeze that was there and gone almost before he could register it. It seemed somehow to make the night even quieter than a Wyoming mountain night usually was. Slim had been right, he decided; they'd have a pretty fair accumulation on the ground by morning—he figured there was a good four inches down already, on top of what had been there before—but it wasn't a blizzard. __Well, shoot, he's lived in this country a lot of years—he'd have got to know the signs by now,__he thought.

He cocked his head, listening for telltale sounds from the bunkroom, then quietly crossed to the little back bedroom, avoiding all the places where he knew he might raise a noise from the floorboards. To the left of the door as you went in was a closet, and in it several flat-topped trunks and old packing boxes full of this and that. He'd smuggled another one in—there were always a few piled up on the sheltered side of the barn, waiting to be broken up for firewood—figuring nobody would really notice it among the rest and would have no reason to open it because they'd already know where to find what was usually kept here, and tucked it into a corner, with his presents for the household hidden in it, except the one obvious one, of course.

There was no hint that anyone had disturbed it. He pondered for a moment, then sat down on one of the bunks to pull off his boots, and after several soft-footed trips had everything neatly arranged in a partial circle around the tree. He wished he'd thought of stocking stuffers, but he figured Slim and Andy and Jonesy would have taken care of one another as far as that went. He went into the kitchen and in the drawer of the dresser found the tablet and pencil Jonesy used to make up his shopping lists. He sat down at the small table, lit the lamp, and after a couple of minutes of hard cogitation, began slowly printing—he knew his handwriting was terrible, but he didn't use it much, after all; only to sign his name. Satisfied that it was neat and legible, if by no means great poetry, he tore off the leaf and returned to the main room to fold it and tuck it under the string tied around the largest box of Jonesy's presents. Then he went back to blow out the kitchen lamp before kneeling to cover the fire. Its soft, drifting warmth made him think once again of the sense of safety and welcome he had found in this house.

__Aw, c'mon, Harper, you're turnin' plumb sentimental. You'll be bawlin' next, __he thought. And with a self-admonitory shake of his head, he padded into the bunkroom and began stripping down in the dark.

**SR**

"Merry Christmas," said Jonesy quietly as he padded out into the kitchen, shoes in hand, to find Slim feeding chunks into the firebox of the stove, where even the top layer of light fuel was briskly blazing. "Cold out, is it?"

"Merry Christmas," Slim returned. "Looks like eight or ten degrees, but it's quit snowin', and it seems to be pretty still." The many valleys and basins typical of Wyoming geography provided ideal pockets for the collection of cold air drainage at night: the colder, heavier air settled into the lower elevations, where protecting mountain ranges kept the wind from stirring it, often sending readings well below zero. It was common to have temperatures in the valleys considerably lower than on the nearby mountainside: ten degrees or more was typical.

Jonesy pulled out a chair and sat down to put his shoes on. "You must'a' got up even earlier than usual," he observed. "I notice there's a pretty fair-sized batch of presents under the tree."

"What?!" Slim's head snapped up. "No, those aren't from me—mine are hidden in the loft. I was gonna get 'em when I went out to start the chores. I figured they were yours."

"Now why would I get up in the middle of the night, when I know good and well I can fetch out my stash while you're out there and Andy's still abed?" Jonesy retorted. They looked at each other, and both said simultaneously, "Jess."

"That's why he sat up after we turned in last night," Slim guessed.

"Well, I'll be," murmured Jonesy. "That boy sure can keep his lips locked when he wants to. I never had a clue. When do you reckon he got 'em?"

"Could have been Friday, after he killed the turkeys," Slim suggested. "He did mention he might make a try for some bigger game; he'd have figured that if we thought he was doin' that, it wouldn't seem strange to us if he took most of the day to get back."

"You did get somethin' for him, don't you?" Jonesy asked. "I know we talked about it, and last night when we talked about puttin' up a stocking for him, you said 'we,' so I figured you must have. I do, and I know Andy does—he rode into town Friday too. They must've just about missed each other, guessin' from when they got in."

Slim smiled suddenly. "You bet I've got somethin' for him. And I'd better get my coat on and get out to the barn so you can start puttin' yours out."

Sunrise wouldn't be till past seven, and the yard was dark as Slim, equipped with a lantern, slogged through the snow—a good six or seven inches of fresh cover—to the barn. He had to go in by way of the sheltered side door under the lean-to roof where they kept the portable forge: the main doors were blocked by a small but very hefty drift. He made quick work of milking and feeding—he'd give all the stock a special Christmas treat later—and while he was up in the loft getting hay, burrowed into the right pile of it to unearth the gifts he'd chosen for Jonesy and Andy, plus a couple of small-enough-for-under-the-tree ones for Jess. He stuffed them into a grain sack and took them back, along with the milk, before going out again to muck out and get some firewood. The kitchen was already filling up with good smells as Jonesy assembled a special holiday breakfast.

By unspoken common consent, they let both Jess and Andy sleep a little later than usual: with no stages due, there was no real need to get them up. They used the time to fill stockings and arrange their bigger presents, gently shifting Jess's array as necessary and doing their best not to shake packages.

At six-thirty Andy came out. "Merry Christmas," he said. "Hey, there's four stockings on the mantelpiece!"

" 'Course there are," Jonesy replied. "You didn't think Slim and me would leave Jess with just a pile of little stuff on the hearth, did you?"

"I better get my gifts out before he wakes up," said Andy. "Don't either of you peek!"

The men looked at each other, chuckled, and retreated to the kitchen to share a cup of coffee and give the boy the privacy he requested.

A little before seven, with the table set for breakfast and the sky lightening over the mountain, Slim got up and said, "Guess somebody'd better wake Jess, or we may not have Christmas till New Year's."

"Don't let him shoot you," Jonesy warned, only half teasingly. "Come on, Andy, help me dish out."

Especially in his first months at the ranch, Jess had proved a light as well as a restless sleeper: occasionally, when Slim got up in the night, he'd roused and had his Colt out and cocked and level in less time than it would take to blink. These incidents had begun to diminish in number since the beginning of the fall, as if he'd become accustomed, even in his sleep, to the distinctive sounds of the rancher's movements, and in fact Slim hadn't seen him do it since they got back from Utah. He recognized this for what it was, a sign of increasing trust and security, but nevertheless, he moved as quietly as he possibly could, sticking close to the bunkroom walls so he wouldn't raise any creaks from the middle of the floor, and deftly, cautiously plucked Jess's gunbelt off the bedpost by his head before he said softly, "Hey, Jess. Time to roll out."

"Huh?" For a man who could snap to full alert in the darkest watches of the night, Jess was slow to rouse at more conventional hours, likely to be only semi-conscious till he'd had his coffee. "Wha'?"

"Breakfast," Slim told him succinctly. "And Merry Christmas," he added, figuring that reminding the Texan of what he'd left under the tree might help him wake up with a little less confusion than usual.

"Christmas?" Jess pushed up on one elbow. "Yeah... that's right, ain't it? Okay... gi'me a minute..."

Smiling to himself, Slim retreated out to the main room. It was more like five minutes, but even that was good time for Jess in the morning. He hadn't shaved yet, and his hair was still rumpled from his pillow, but he'd put on a clean shirt—his best dark-blue sateen one—in honor of the day, and at some point he'd found time to polish his boots too.

Andy greeted him with a flying embrace. "Merry Christmas, Jess!"

"Merry Christmas, Tiger." The Texan's voice was still rough and blurry with sleep, but the warmth in it was unmistakeable. "Merry Christmas, Jonesy—Slim. Somethin' smells real fine."

"Sit down before it gets cold," Jonesy ordered, "and we'll see if it tastes as good as it smells."

It did. Jonesy had pulled out all the stops—his best oat porridge topped with chopped nuts, grated apples, cinnamon and brown sugar, with honey and maple syrup on the side for those who wanted either or both; scrambled eggs and pork chops, scalloped potatoes, and stewed canned tomatoes; hot biscuits split open, spread with home-churned sweet butter, and spooned over with country gravy; home-canned peaches and raspberries; the summit of any breakfast, golden buckwheat cakes, the batter risen overnight in a crock, as light and high and non-doughy as a sponge cake, with butter and warmed maple syrup; and even a coffee cake, filled with soaked dried apricots, prunes, and apples, with a selection of fully half a dozen kinds of jams and jellies to spread on it. There was much joking and trading of stories as everyone dug in; even Jess, who had been pretty close-mouthed last night, seemed more cheerful and outgoing now, and talked about how the Mexicans down south celebrated the holiday and about the time he'd encountered some wild camels in the Arizona Territory ("No, honest, range word on it, there really are some—Jeff Davis fetched 'em in to haul supplies for th'Army when he was Secretary of War, but they got the worst dispositions of any critter ever made, and horses and mules is scared greener of 'em than of snakes, so when most of the Regulars pulled out durin' the war, they was sold off or escaped"), while the crackling fire on the hearth warmed the main room for the gift-swapping to come.

Jess was plainly both amazed and delighted at his presents: the gingerbread and cinnamon rolls, candy and oranges from Jonesy, a pair of fleece-lined winter_ tapaderos _for his stirrups and a reloading tool from Slim, the slippers and bandanna from Andy, and—most unexpected of all—a stockingfull of small delights: a new razor and strop, a folding pocket comb, a watch charm centered with a ten-rayed sunburst in fancy colors, some sinkers and split shot for fishing trips, a pocket match safe and gun oiler, and a "housewife," a little pocket kit of needles, thread, extra buttons, and such, so he could do his own mending if he was away from the ranch. He looked startled when the first—the stocking—was handed to him (as Jonesy had predicted, he hadn't even noticed it was there when he first came out), bewildered at the second, and downright overcome at the third, after which, having apparently become somewhat numbed, he simply accepted them without comment, only thanking the giver conscientiously. He seemed especially drawn to the oranges, admiring their perfect shapes and sniffing their sweet citrus scent again and again.

Jonesy had the vest, shirts, suspenders, watch chain and charms, pipe and tobacco from Jess, the tobacco pouch and shotgun set from Andy, and from Slim a cuff-and-collar box, a dozen fancy linen huck towels for the kitchen with textured patterns woven into them, and a handsome tasselled scarf to throw over the top of his piano; from his stocking came a duck call, a set of gold shirt studs with little pearls set in them, a set of doughnut cutters, a pair of violet sleeve garters, a red-and-yellow handkerchief, and a novelty match safe, in the shape of a frying pan with a half-eggshell on it, to nail to the kitchen wall. Slim's stocking produced a pair of crystal rosettes to put on Alamo's bridle for special occasions, a goose call, a brush to polish his boots with, a nickeled postage-stamp box with a device of a mountain lion resting in its den, a pair of round cuff buttons with a raised design set with brilliants, a set of pen-nibs, half a dozen sticks of colored sealing-wax, and an initial seal for it; his larger gifts included a leather game bag and shell box, a perpetual calendar for his desk, with a case of silk cloth and colored leather, and a hand brace packed in a plain but sturdy wooden box along with a full set of eight bits, besides the gloves, tie, and Brady book from his brother, of which the last was clearly his favorite, or nearly so, though he tried not to be too obvious about his pleasure in it. He was also touched and delighted by the watch Jess gave him, and couldn't seem to stop taking it out of its little pasteboard box to run his thumb lightly over the raised design on the cover. "I thought on gettin' a sentiment engraved inside the lid," Jess confessed, "but time I picked it up there wasn't enough time to get it done."

"That's all right, Jess," Slim assured him. "It's beautiful just the way it is. I can't tell you how much I appreciate havin' it. Thank you."

Andy had a folding gameboard, one side painted for checkers and chess, the other for backgammon, with a set of checkers, a dice cup, and dice tucked away inside, as well as games of Authors, squails, tiddlywinks, and pachisi, a pair of nickel-plated ice skates ("built for speed and long-distance skating," the box declared), a telescope, a pair of boxing gloves, a handsome stitched buckskin winter coat with a colorful blanket lining, a wolfskin cap, a student's telegraph instrument with a pamphlet of the Morse code, and books—Mary Cowden Clarke's __The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines__ in two volumes, Georg M. Ebers's newly-translated __An ____Egyptian Princess,__ the abridged one-volume edition of Sir Austin Layard's __Nineveh and Its Remains, __George Kennan's __Tent Life in Siberia, __the three volumes of Bulfinch's __Mythology,__ and Mayne Reid's latest, __The Castaways. __ In his stocking were a pocket compass, a harmonica, a set of dominoes, a man's pocketknife with four knife blades and four specialized ones, a supply of his favorite sourballs, some caramels in a gauze bag to keep them from sticking to everything around them, and two or three ingenious small puzzles, including the infamous "Columbus egg." The stereoscope and views Jess had chosen for him were the hit of the day—even Slim and Jonesy wanted to look—but the bit, bridle, spurs, and fishing flies were scarcely less so.

No one had noticed that Jess kept unobtrusively pushing one large box back under the tree, until when they all thought everything had been opened, he produced it and handed it to Jonesy. "Well, now, where'd this come from?" the old man asked, taking out his pocketknife to cut the string. "Heavy, too... Duck decoys! Thanks, Jess! I'll get you boys some fine dinners with these."

"Jonesy, look, somethin' was tucked under the string," said Andy, pouncing on the scrap of paper that had fluttered to the floor in the man's concentration on the package itself. "Looks like it was torn off your grocery-list tablet."

Jonesy cautiously opened the twist of paper, unfolded it, and slowly read out the carefully block-printed letters:

__In the barn, beneath some hay,  
Is something for this special day.__

He looked up at Jess with a hint of a suspicious squint. "Now what would you have got me that you had to leave in the barn? It's not somethin' alive, is it?"

Jess grinned. "No, it ain't, but if you want to find out, you got to go out and look."

"Let's all look," Slim suggested. The others were so fixated on Jonesy that none of them noticed how eager and relieved he seemed to be at the opportunity to say this without having to explain its connection to himself.

So they all got into coats and gloves and snow excluders and followed Slim's trail of earlier that morning across the yard. "This way," said Jess, taking charge. "Slim, you do me a favor and cover his eyes, huh? Andy, come gi'me a hand here, we got all this hay to shift..."

Andy couldn't hold back a gasp as the partly-open crate came into view. "Jess! You didn't!"

"I sure did, Tiger. Okay, Slim, let him see."

Slim, who was smiling too now, uncovered his old friend's eyes and moved the lantern nearer to the crate. Jonesy stared at it in disbelief. "My icebox," he said after a moment or two, his voice hushed in awe. "You got my icebox. Jess—boy, you shouldn't!"

"Sure I should," Jess retorted. "Ain't present-givin' s'posed to be about makin' the other feller happy? You been wantin' this here a long spell. Figured I had the money to spare, no tellin' when it might happen again." To Slim: "I reckon me and you can move it into the kitchen tomorrow—I used the grain sledge and it worked just fine gettin' it off Benson's delivery wagon."

The rancher nodded. "We'll do that. And speakin' of makin' the other feller happy... come here, there's somethin' for you to see."

He had housed the filly in the barn's one loose box, where the stud lived when he was in residence, since she wasn't halter-broke yet and might have fought restraints in a straight stall. In the shadows Jess could hardly make her out at first, till Slim held the lantern over the top of the swing door. "For me?" the Texan whispered in a disbelief that equalled Jonesy's of a few minutes earlier. "Slim, no, she's a forty-dollar horse just as she stands, maybe more when she gets her growth."

"Last time I sold off one of her full sisters," said Slim calmly, "she fetched eighty-five at four years old. And haven't you ever heard that it's bad luck to take gifts back? She's yours, Jess. No strings. Because I wanted to give you somethin' I knew you'd appreciate, just like you knew Jonesy would the icebox, or Andy the horse gear and the stereoscope."

For a minute or two none of them—Jess included—was entirely sure he wasn't about to be brought to tears. Then, with a loud sniff, he dragged his sleeve across his face and said shakily, "She's a beauty. Thanks, Slim. I'll break her easy, the Comanche way. You'll have to help me name her, Tiger."

"I've got one more present for you too, Jess," Andy told him. "Back in the house."

Once they had their outside gear hung up, the boy insisted that Jess had to sit down in his rocking chair to receive this last gift. Then he went back to the big bookcase Matt Sherman had put up against the rear wall of the room and pulled out a small stack of volumes from the bottom shelf, where they'd obviously been purposely assembled. "Merry Christmas, Jess," he said softly, setting them on the Texan's knees.

Slowly Jess looked the covers over, one after another. Edward Lear's __Book of Nonsense, Alice in Wonderland, The Swiss Family Robinson, ____Tales From Shakespeare, __Hans Christian Andersen, an illustrated natural history, an American history (also illustrated) that went all the way back to the Indians; an atlas that must have cost five or six dollars, with astronomical pages and a descriptive section on the history, politics, economy, and peoples of the world; and an anthology of well over 700 pages, with steel-plate engravings, entitled __The Treasure Chest of the Familiar: Being a Collection of the Finest Jewels of Maxims, Proverbs, Fables, Essays, Orations, Quotations, Dialogues, Narratives, Ballads, Songs, and Poems of Heroism, Romance, Adventure, and Patriotism, From All Times and Countries, For Reading, Recitation, and Family Enjoyment.__ The date on the title page was 1868. Gingerly Jess opened it to the table of contents and scanned down the list of authors' names, recognizing many he'd seen on the spines of the Shermans' books—Aesop, Shakespeare, Byron, Tennyson, Lamb, Pope, Artemus Ward, Charles Dickens, Macaulay, Scott, Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Moore, Thomas Campbell—and seeing many others that weren't familiar at all, Daniel Webster, Francis Bacon, Seneca, John Pierpont, Wordsworth, Lovelace, Bishop Berkeley. Even Robert E. Lee was there.

He looked up at the boy, then around at Slim and Jonesy. "Tiger, I—I can't take these. That filly is one thing, but these—they're your books."

"But if they're mine," Andy replied, "I can give them away if I want to, can't I? I've had so much fun from them, and learned so much... I want you to do the same. And like Slim said, it's bad luck to take a gift back. Please, Jess, it would mean a lot to me if you'd take them."

"Don't look at me," said Slim. "He's right. They're his property, and he can dispose of them as he sees fit. Seems to me that a gift of somethin' you've enjoyed yourself is even more meaningful than somethin' bought new for the occasion."

Jess swallowed hard and blinked rapidly, then breathed in once loudly and said quietly, "Thanks, Andy. Thanks a lot. I'll try to get as much pleasure out of 'em as I know you have."

"Now that we've got that settled," Jonesy said into the moment of awkward silence that followed, "all the lot of you get out of my way so I can start the dinner. We eat at the stroke of two."

"Okay, Jonesy," Slim agreed with a little laugh. "We'll give the animals their Christmas feast while you're workin' on ours. Come on, Andy, Jess, you help me."

The horses and Jonesy's milk cows got a special warm mash, and there were sliced-up apples and carrots and a little sweet feed for the former too. All Andy's pets were given treats, and he also tied chunks of beef suet to the bare branches of the little transplanted cottonwood beside the porch, for the wild birds, and spread some extra chicken feed for them. Helping him reach the higher limbs, Slim told him quietly, "Andy, I'm very proud of you. I know those books you gave Jess were some of your favorites. That was a very selfless, generous thing for you to do."

"I hope he'll like 'em," Andy confided. "I know he doesn't read too well—not as well as I do—but I figured since he can get through__Frank Leslie's__ or the __Gazette__ he should be able to work them out." He didn't say that he hoped the process of reading them would hold Jess at the ranch, but he was thinking it; he knew the Texan preferred to travel light, and figured that half a score of books, including a couple of big ones, would be more than he'd want to burden Traveller with. The filly could serve him as a pack horse, but not till she was saddle-broke, and Jess was too good a horseman to try to do that before she turned three. __If he'll just give us more time to show him how much he means to us, __Andy told himself— __though he should have some idea, after today... maybe there'll come a time when he won't want to leave any more. Maybe I'm not as unselfish as you think, Slim. I want him to stay. So do you, or you wouldn't have gone all the way to Utah after him.__

"They may even help him to read __better,"__ Slim pointed out, "and you and I will be around if he gets stuck on a word."

After that Andy and Jess shovelled the drift away from the main doors of the barn, and then got into a snowball fight that left them both red-faced and panting, their jackets splattered with the soft snow. They were still recovering their breath when Sheriff Mort Corey and his wife Sarah drove into the yard in a two-seat market wagon fitted with runners, with Mose sitting in the back keeping guard over a couple of large crates swathed in quilts and buffalo robes and thickly banked with straw to prevent their contents from freezing. Their team had to be put up, and they had to be shown everyone's gifts, and tender their own, for Sarah, like yesterday's guests, had brought food: a chocolate layer cake and a frosted two-layer yellow one with custard filling, a dozen assorted quarts of jams and jellies, two kinds of cookies—Scotch Fancies and soft, rich chocolate cookies made with Wilbur's cocoa—and miniature pastries for which she had a name throughout the county, little pockets of brown, flaky dough filled with her own homemade red-raspberry jam. Mort had a brown earthen gallon jug of sweet cider, to which not even Jonesy could object as long as it was drunk up before it could start working, and Mose had brought a five-pound sack of Ceylon Java coffee, a bag of Bermuda onions, half a dozen cans of oysters, hickory nuts and Spanish almonds and some Herkimer cheddar cheese. He had also woven a Sunday hatband for Andy, of horsehair dyed in bright colors, and matching watch fobs of the same for the three men. Slim pounced on the jug—"Just what we need to go with dinner, even Andy can drink it"—and by that time Jonesy had the food ready to go on the table.

Though Mary Sherman's best snow-white satin-like damask tablecloth had been brought out, its Dresden pattern of dancing Cupids and flower garlands encircling the centerpiece could scarcely be made out for the platters, tureens, casseroles, and serving dishes jammed edge-to-edge on it. One of Jess's turkey gobblers rested at one end, brown and crisp-skinned from basting and steaming gently, balanced at the other end by Hardiman's ham baked in cider sauce. In between—some of it the work of Jonesy's hands, some brought by Sarah, in the crates, as her contribution and needing only to be warmed up—were scalloped oysters, smooth, fluffy mashed potatoes, flecked with specks of pepper and tasting of butter and cream, baked sweet-potatoes, steamed squash, sweet fried parsnips, creamed onions, sliced boiled beets, glazed carrots, fried cabbage done as Jonesy's mother back in Indiana had made it, with salt, pepper, butter, green pepper, mushrooms and onions, coleslaw with sweet-sour dressing, salmon salad (no less tasty for the fact that the fish had come out of a can), brown gravy, ham gravy, cranberry sauce and sour-grape jelly, hot crusty biscuits and piping-hot yeast-rolls, butter and preserves and pickles.

Family and guests arranged themselves around the long table, Slim as host gallantly holding Sarah's chair for her before going to his own. Then he raised his cup of cider and said, "Before we begin, I'd like to propose a toast."

Everyone reached for cups. "Here's to Christmas," Slim began, "to all it means to us—to the people who can't be here to celebrate it with us—and to old friends and new ones, to family, to abundance, and to a happy, healthy, and prosperous new year to come."

_"_Salud,"__ Jess murmured from his left side, across from Andy, wondering whether his boss, who after all did have some familiarity with Indian ways, had deliberately put him in what most tribes reckoned the place of first honor. Everyone drank.

"And now," the rancher finished, "let's eat!"

They took him at his word. He carved the turkey, and Mort, as the ranking guest, peeled pink slices off the ham. Plates piled high with delicious food were passed up and down the table, and there was a scarcely a dish that wasn't extravagantly praised. Other toasts were drunk—to the President and the American Eagle, to the Overland Stage Company ("the founder of the feast, as Mr. Dickens said," Mort observed, though it was Mose, not surprisingly, who proposed the toast itself), to the Territory and its Governor and Legislature, to "the ladies of Wyoming—may they long enjoy the franchise," to "the sacred memory of George Washington, the Patriot Army, and the Continental Congress," and even—rather to Jess's astonishment, especially as it was offered by Slim—"to Robert E. Lee and the gallant men of the South, who fought bravely for what they believed and for their homes and families." Then the dishes were cleared off and the desserts came out—mince pie made with Jonesy's venison mincemeat; the "kitchen-sink pie" he had described to Andy, which proved to be a great success (Sarah demanded to have a copy of the recipe); sugar cream pie, a caramel-like Indiana concoction with a filling made from flour, butter, salt, vanilla, cream, and brown sugar cradled inside a crumbly single crust; wild-red-raspberry pie; and of course a blazing plum pudding. Despite his usual for-medicinal-purposes-only attitude, even Jonesy had a polite sip of some of the blackberry brandy Slim had laid in to soak the pudding in ("Be a sin to let it go to waste," he said), and Andy was allowed a tiny sample of it too.

Afterward a community clean-up was organized, everyone taking a part in scraping, stacking, washing, drying, and putting away the dishes and silver, and they all adjourned to the main room to gather around the piano. Slim lit the candles on the tree, sunset being around half-past four, and Jonesy started them off with cheery tunes, including old minstrel-show favorites—"The Blue-Tail Fly," "Kitty of Coleraine," "The Rose of Alabama," "The Merry Swiss Boy," "Git Along Home, You Spanish Girl," "The Folks Are All Waiting to See the Fast Steamer," "The High Salary Driver of the Denver City Line," "Little Brown Jug," "Lanigan's Ball," "The Frog He Would A-Wooing Go," various Stephen Foster compositions, and the "Pirates' Chorus" from _The Enchantress._ Then he moved on to quieter pieces, folk songs and sentimental love songs: "Come, O Come With Me, the Moon is Beaming," "I'll Remember You, Love, in My Prayers," "Barb'ry Ellen," "Greensleeves," "Long, Long Ago," "Go 'Way From My Window," "Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies," "Then You'll Remember Me," "Green Grow the Lilacs," "Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still." He played "Billy Venero" and "The Leather-Winged Bat" because Jess asked for them, "O'Reilly's Daughter" at Mose's request and "I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls" for Sarah to sing solo to, and then swung into a succession of Christmas songs—"Silent Night," "The First Nowell," "Christians, Awake, Salute the Happy Morn," "While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night," "As With Gladness Men of Old," "Hark, the Glad Sound," "Go Tell It on the Mountain," and at last a ringing conclusion of "Good King Wenceslaus," "O Come All Ye Faithful," "Wassail, Wassail, All Over the Town," and "Joy to the World" with the sustaining pedal down as far as he could get it.

After this they played games—crambo, Magic Music (which required Jonesy to return to his piano for a while, not that he objected), hunt-the-slipper, Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, Twenty Questions, and alphabet games, Initials and I Love My Love. At last it was time for the guests to go home and the ranch family, having seen them off, to do the evening barn chores and button up for the night. At some point Slim missed Jess, and after checking to make sure he wasn't visiting his new filly, slipped quietly out the side door of the barn and stood under the lean-to roof, looking around the yard, until he spotted the dark solitary figure leaning on the pasture fence. Steps muffled by the snow, he crossed the open space under the half-moon and sparkling stars. "You okay?" he asked gently.

Jess didn't even start, as he usually did when accosted out of nowhere. He was staring toward the mountains, his face unreadable, but Slim noticed the glitter in his eyes and the gleaming streak where a tear had made its way down his lean cheek. He didn't seem to be aware that he'd been crying. "I... I ain't not okay," he said slowly. "I know that likely don't make much sense, but... well, I ain't schooled, and I ain't good with words." He lowered his eyes briefly. "Ain't half so smart as you, Slim."

__Matter of opinion,__ thought Slim, __but every man's entitled to his own, even if it's wrong. You were smart enough to fool us into not expecting to get any presents from you, that's certain___. _But he wasn't about to argue the point. He'd come to know Jess well enough to know that when the Texan started running himself down, he was either ill or very depressed, and in the latter case he didn't want to take the chance of making it worse. "Nobody's askin' you to be," he said. "Just say what you feel."

Jess shook his head. "I can't," he replied. "I—I just can't, Slim, I'm sorry." __I'm scared,__ he added inside himself. __I never reckoned on the kind of Christmas you all give me today. It ain't about bein' given presents; it's about what's behind the presents, just like with the ones I got for you. I see now that I ain't the only one who thinks of this place as my home. I know you do too, and—and I'm scared down to my bones that if I say so, I'll lose it, like I lost the first one.__

He took a deep breath. "You ain't got no notion what it meant to me, this day," he said carefully. "It... it's been about the best day I can remember." He struggled for words a moment. "I can't... I can't say thank you the way I want to. It's—it was more'n I ever looked for, more'n I deserved."

"That's not true," Slim rebuked gently. "No—don't say it. Jess, you're not the same man who rode into this yard seven and a half months ago. And not one of us here is the same as we'd have been if we'd never known you—especially me. I want to thank _you,_ for makin' that possible."

The younger man looked sharply around. His mobile eyebrows were canted up in the middle, the way they got when he was trying to deal with intense emotion or severe pain. "I ain't done nothin', Slim. Anythin' you've come to be, you had it in you to be all along."

"But it took you bein' here to bring it out," Slim insisted. "And I'm grateful—more than you can possibly guess, because I see now that I was on my way to turnin' into someone who wouldn't have been very likeable; someone I don't think I'd have liked very much myself. In fact, I was a good few miles along the road; I just didn't know how to turn around. What you've had today, from me, from all of us... you earned it." His gloved hand settled on Jess's forearm and squeezed. "And don't you ever, __ever, __let me hear you say you didn't."

Jess's midnight-blue eyes searched his face. __Maybe,__ he thought, __there's more'n one way of bein' afraid—or of sayin' thank you. Maybe all this, today, was to tell me I was home, only they didn't know how to put it in words, same as I don't know how to tell him what I'm feelin'. Or maybe they reckoned that if they just told me straight out, I wouldn't believe it. But that don't make it no less real, I reckon.__

__Maybe... maybe the real core of a thing, of anything, is all in how you say it—even if you don't say it in words.__

"I'm okay," he said softly, "and gettin' better all the time. 'Cause I know findin' you, and Andy, and Jonesy... I know it's changed my life. I ain't ever fixin' to forget that. Merry Christmas, Slim, and Happy New Year. And thanks. Again."

"Merry Christmas, Jess." Slim paused, took a breath. "Now let's find Andy and go in. We can sample some of the cakes and cookies, and Andy and Jonesy can make another pot of cocoa to go with theirs, and there's just about enough of that brandy left for two more glasses."

"Sounds good to me," Jess agreed, trying to convey with his eyes and his tone what he couldn't say aloud.

They turned and walked back across the snow-covered yard, side by side under the vast cold Wyoming sky.

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**Note: ** Glass Christmas ornaments were originally made in a German village named Lauscha, about 60 miles north of Nuernberg, in the province of Thueringen. It was a cottage industry then. The ornaments were blown (generally by the men of the household and their half-grown daughters) and silvered or painted (by the women and their older sons) in a workshop attached to a home, and the grandparents and younger children helped finish and box them and deliver the boxes to the village railroad station. These families worked 15-16 hours a day, every day but Sunday, all year round, each turning out 300-600 glass balls per week (15,600-31,200 in twelve months' time), depending on size and complexity. The village came by this industry naturally, having been a center for blown-glass work since the 1590's.

At least one legend claims that such ornaments were first created in the 16th century by a glassblower named Hans Greiner, who made them in the shapes of the fruits which were then the traditional "core" of Christmas-tree trimmings, and that others saw and liked them, began to order them, and thus fostered the establishment of a new industry. Most historians, however, believe that the balls were first produced in the 1820's (by another Hans Greiner, a direct descendant of the first one, which may account for the confusion), being at first blown freehand in simple globes, although the highly skilled craftsmen quickly figured out how to make them in shapes like fruits, nuts, even horns and reindeer (as anyone will believe who has ever seen a modern freehand glassblower exhibiting his craft); some time in the '50's molds were introduced, allowing more complex ones—hearts, stars, angels, bells, acorns, grape clusters, mushrooms (a German good-luck symbol)—to be fashioned. (Blown-glass beads, chiefly for the jewelry and millinery trades, had been another Lauschan product until the Bohemians came up with better processes in the '40's; almost certainly someone must have thought early on of making garlands of them for tree-trimming too.)

Such ornaments became popular in England in the middle '40's, along with the Christmas tree, both imported by Queen Victoria's consort, Prince Albert, who was, of course, a German himself. They were first sold in American stores around 1870, but didn't become widely popular here until F. W. Woolworth began to stock them in his new five-and-ten-cent stores about a decade later—and found them flying out the door at a rate he'd never expected; one historian credits Christmas ornaments with being the basis of his fortune (estimated by some at an eventual $25,000,000, in a day when a million meant something). But one story in __Harper's,__ published in 1867, explicitly features glass balls and stars displayed on a family tree. And, regardless of when or by whom they were first made, the German nation has always been known for its enthusiastic observation of Christmas, so I've assumed that German immigrants to the United States—a numerous tribe beginning in the 1820's—would have frequently brought such traditional objects over in their luggage, just as they brought other aspects of their traditional __Gemutlichkeit, __and that the custom would have spread, in a rather informal, localized way, in any region where they settled in numbers.

I could never have written about the ranch family's gifts to one another without my copies of the Chelsea House reprint of the __1897 Sears, Roebuck &amp; Co. Catalogue, __first published in 1997, and Dover's "unabridged facsimile" of __Catalogue No. 57, Montgomery Ward &amp; Co., 1895.__ Anyone curious about typical 19th-century goods and what they cost (although you should automatically double the catalogue prices, as I did, to allow for the fact that both firms were at that time wholesale by-mail-only houses) shouldn't fail to own these fascinating oversized softcovers.

__The Treasure Chest of the Familiar __(unlike all the other books and authors mentioned herein) is fictional, but typical of the "speakers" commonly published in Victorian times (they were much like readers, but with selections chosen for reading aloud and dramatic expression), and based loosely on an 1888 collection, __Crown Jewels and Gems of Literature, Art, and Music,__ edited by Henry Davenport Northrop, and on Ralph Louis Woods's excellent anthology series, __The Treasury of the Familiar ___(1945), ___Second Treasury of the_ Familiar_ (1959), and __Third Treasury of the Familiar__ (1970), copies of which (if you're curious) can still be found online without too much trouble or expense. The atlas is similarly based on an actual book,__The ____Columbian Class Book,__ which was written long before the Civil War, yet widened the horizons of its young readers far beyond the United States or even the Western Hemisphere, taught them much about the geography and history of the entire world, and also explained that the earth is but one of several planets revolving around the gigantic, fiery, and distant sun, and that even this sun is but one of the millions of similar suns called stars.

The filly Slim gives Jess will grow up to be the black mare he's riding in "The Barefoot Kid."

__**MERRY CHRISTMAS!**__


End file.
